5 ms·
One of the unfortunate things about Wayland is every compositor will have its own quality of implementation affecting things like latency. With XOrg, especiall
by pengaru 3y ago
One of the unfortunate things about Wayland is every compositor will have its own quality of implementation affecting things like latency.
With XOrg, especially in the pre-compositing days, you could choose whatever WM you want and it wouldn't have any impact on the rendering performance of X clients. Once the Composite extension was added and everyone started running composited X desktops, that started to change, and the increased latency already started appearing - in an arguably worse architecture than Wayland because there were often three processes involved with lots of IPC/context switches per draw: X-Client->X-Server->X-Compositor->X-Server->CRTC. At least in Wayland it's more like Wayland-Client->Wayland-Compositor->CRTC.
If you're unhappy with the rendering latency of your Wayland sessions, it may be worth trying alternative compositors... they likely vary significantly. The Valve/Steam folks have made a minimal one specifically optimized for games/low-latency [0]. I doubt the SteamDeck would be seeing as much success as it is if Wayland were so problematic in this department.
[0]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
- arp242 3y agoIf most WMs are slower out of the box then Wayland is de-facto slower. "But actually, Wayland is a protocol, and you can use this specialized WM optimized for speed" doesn't change much about that. I don't use a compositing WM. I would have to check how the performance compares to a compositing WM. It's just one more thing that's worse-out-of-the-box with Wayland that I need to find a solution for, while at the same time solving exactly zero issues for me.