6 ms·

He seems confused at the end why people think wayland is so slow, but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result? People were probably running x11 game

He seems confused at the end why people think wayland is so slow, but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result? People were probably running x11 games on wayland and noticed that significant lag. Just a wild guess. Very nice article, wish people did actual measurements like this more often, of all sorts of things.

superkuh 3mo ago
You can't just test one wayland compositor and talk about the performance of all wayland compositors. They're vastly different, especially when it comes to the extensions to wayland needed to handle input devices (ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/). It's not like how xorg is the standard strong reference implementation for X11 everywhere that works the same everywhere. What's probably happening is that other wayland compositors are slower than KDE Plasma wayland which he tested. And people report that experience. Some other wayland compositors might even be faster than plasma. But what is for sure is that every wayland is very different from every other wayland.
- hparadiz 3mo ago
  You will also get different results by gpu, compiler, kernel, architecture, and then of course compositor. Even a slightly different version of some lib might throw off the results. In any case the methodology in the post is sound and should be used for benchmarking in the future.
  - superkuh 3mo ago
    The methodology works and it's a fine result. But it's important to remember that talking about one wayland is not talking about all waylands the way talking about xorg/X11 is.
- zamalek 3mo ago
  And FWIW, KDE probably make the most effort with their compositor. They have historically been well ahead of the curve for things that might affect this (e.g. VRR).
datakan 3mo ago
I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- tapoxi 3mo ago
  I mean normally this type of discussion is silly, but in playing competitive shooters latency does make a huge difference, and it shows that XWayland is adding ~4ms of latency. There is a native Wayland driver for Wine/Proton but it's enabled through an environment variable, not by default. This will probably be default in Wine 12/Proton 12 because Valve wants to squeeze as much performance out of SteamOS as possible. The gaming mode UI runs under Valve's own Wayland compositor (gamescope) already, but games are currently in nested XWayland windows.
- wing-_-nuts 3mo ago
  My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves. All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false. I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.
retatop 3mo ago
Isn't Wayland always one frame delayed compared to Xorg to avoid tearing or has that been changed? If so, his very high refresh rate would minimize that effect
- hackernudes 3mo ago
  I don't think there was ever a design to be one frame behind. Compositing requires the GPU to do some extra work to draw the frame to be presented. This typically takes very little time (much less than a full frame period). Additionally, most wayland compositors will bypass that extra step if an application is full screen (wlroots calls it "direct scanout"). Also some wayland compositors keep track of timing and delay the final composition until right before it is time to present the frame in order to reduce latency.
  - gf000 3mo ago
    And for the complete picture, X is predominantly used with a compositor, so that same extra latency exists there as well.
    - cwillu 3mo ago
      It's generally a single checkbox to turn off compositing in X11, for precisely this reason.
      - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
        You can also disable compositing conditionally in KDE, such as when a game window is opened.
        Chu4eeno 3mo ago
        Not in Wayland, the whole point of Wayland is to make stuff the X server + compositor + various other bits into the window manager.
Aurornis 3mo ago
> and noticed that significant lag Only xwayland showed that result. The difference was only a couple milliseconds. That’s in the range where I start to doubt that people are feeling the latency difference. If it was 10-20ms I could believe it, but not when it’s a couple milliseconds. The author of this post did a good job of getting all of the other confounding settings out of the way. It’s possible that the people complaining that Wayland was slow were starting from an unoptimized situation and as part of switching to some low latency variant they set all the correct settings.
- cgyvbunji 3mo ago
  You might be right, 8 ms of total end to end latency is about 1 frame at 120 hz or half a frame of 60 hz, someone would need to be quite competitive to notice that. And the baseline was 4 ms, so going from half a frame of total e2e latency at 120 hz to 1 frame, not much of a difference. Also in 2026 I'm realizing it might be doubtful that many games would still be only x11, so I'm not sure how common it would be to encounter xwayland in a game today realistically.
- mikenew 3mo ago
  Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time. I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.
  - lightedman 3mo ago
    Try musicians that are used to playing extremely high speed semihemidemisemiquavers. We notice latency. Neil Peart could almost get sample-precise timing, he was so godlike.
    - gf000 3mo ago
      Humans are good at predicting stuff, and they can notice when the expected doesn't happen. But I wouldn't necessarily say that people can notice it everywhere in every state of mind. The medium, context etc all matter a lot.
its-summertime 3mo ago
the statements of wayland being slow or not need a lot of context: what version of the game they played, the display server, the game settings, the display server settings, the monitor's feature set, the video card's feature set, the video card driver version, etc.
hulitu 3mo ago
> but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result No. Wayland is slow on its own. You can test it without Xwayland.

superkuh 3mo ago

You can't just test one wayland compositor and talk about the performance of all wayland compositors. They're vastly different, especially when it comes to the extensions to wayland needed to handle input devices (ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/). It's not like how xorg is the standard strong reference implementation for X11 everywhere that works the same everywhere. What's probably happening is that other wayland compositors are slower than KDE Plasma wayland which he tested. And people report that experience. Some other wayland compositors might even be faster than plasma. But what is for sure is that every wayland is very different from every other wayland.

hparadiz 3mo ago
You will also get different results by gpu, compiler, kernel, architecture, and then of course compositor. Even a slightly different version of some lib might throw off the results. In any case the methodology in the post is sound and should be used for benchmarking in the future.
- superkuh 3mo ago
  The methodology works and it's a fine result. But it's important to remember that talking about one wayland is not talking about all waylands the way talking about xorg/X11 is.
zamalek 3mo ago
And FWIW, KDE probably make the most effort with their compositor. They have historically been well ahead of the curve for things that might affect this (e.g. VRR).

datakan 3mo ago

I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
tapoxi 3mo ago
I mean normally this type of discussion is silly, but in playing competitive shooters latency does make a huge difference, and it shows that XWayland is adding ~4ms of latency. There is a native Wayland driver for Wine/Proton but it's enabled through an environment variable, not by default. This will probably be default in Wine 12/Proton 12 because Valve wants to squeeze as much performance out of SteamOS as possible. The gaming mode UI runs under Valve's own Wayland compositor (gamescope) already, but games are currently in nested XWayland windows.
wing-_-nuts 3mo ago
My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves. All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false. I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.

retatop 3mo ago

Isn't Wayland always one frame delayed compared to Xorg to avoid tearing or has that been changed? If so, his very high refresh rate would minimize that effect

hackernudes 3mo ago
I don't think there was ever a design to be one frame behind. Compositing requires the GPU to do some extra work to draw the frame to be presented. This typically takes very little time (much less than a full frame period). Additionally, most wayland compositors will bypass that extra step if an application is full screen (wlroots calls it "direct scanout"). Also some wayland compositors keep track of timing and delay the final composition until right before it is time to present the frame in order to reduce latency.
- gf000 3mo ago
  And for the complete picture, X is predominantly used with a compositor, so that same extra latency exists there as well.
  - cwillu 3mo ago
    It's generally a single checkbox to turn off compositing in X11, for precisely this reason.
    - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
      You can also disable compositing conditionally in KDE, such as when a game window is opened.
      - Chu4eeno 3mo ago
        Not in Wayland, the whole point of Wayland is to make stuff the X server + compositor + various other bits into the window manager.

Aurornis 3mo ago

> and noticed that significant lag Only xwayland showed that result. The difference was only a couple milliseconds. That’s in the range where I start to doubt that people are feeling the latency difference. If it was 10-20ms I could believe it, but not when it’s a couple milliseconds. The author of this post did a good job of getting all of the other confounding settings out of the way. It’s possible that the people complaining that Wayland was slow were starting from an unoptimized situation and as part of switching to some low latency variant they set all the correct settings.

cgyvbunji 3mo ago
You might be right, 8 ms of total end to end latency is about 1 frame at 120 hz or half a frame of 60 hz, someone would need to be quite competitive to notice that. And the baseline was 4 ms, so going from half a frame of total e2e latency at 120 hz to 1 frame, not much of a difference. Also in 2026 I'm realizing it might be doubtful that many games would still be only x11, so I'm not sure how common it would be to encounter xwayland in a game today realistically.
mikenew 3mo ago
Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time. I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.
- lightedman 3mo ago
  Try musicians that are used to playing extremely high speed semihemidemisemiquavers. We notice latency. Neil Peart could almost get sample-precise timing, he was so godlike.
  - gf000 3mo ago
    Humans are good at predicting stuff, and they can notice when the expected doesn't happen. But I wouldn't necessarily say that people can notice it everywhere in every state of mind. The medium, context etc all matter a lot.

its-summertime 3mo ago

the statements of wayland being slow or not need a lot of context: what version of the game they played, the display server, the game settings, the display server settings, the monitor's feature set, the video card's feature set, the video card driver version, etc.

hulitu 3mo ago

> but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result No. Wayland is slow on its own. You can test it without Xwayland.