Linux & Display Servers

Everything about latency. Tips, testing methods, mouse lag, display lag, game engine lag, network lag, whole input lag chain, VSYNC OFF vs VSYNC ON, and more! Input Lag Articles on Blur Busters.
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silikone
Posts: 57
Joined: 02 Aug 2014, 12:27

Linux & Display Servers

Post by silikone » 10 Apr 2022, 18:33

I recently decided to hop over to Linux in a journey to experience the joy of low latency with free software. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to settle on anything ideal as my testing has yielded mixed results.

Wayland and X underpin the various desktops available, and they each seem to have certain properties that are significant in regards to latency. I was initially shocked when nothing I did could trigger a low-lag tearing mode when I first installed a desktop, despite clearly having seen this years prior. I presumed it came down to poor drivers, but I eventually discovered that this was an artifact of using Wayland specifically. Once I switched over to X, I felt right at home as a Windows gamer.

So is X the better choice when not considering VRR? I would have hoped it was that simple, but I have been able to see a notably higher GPU-bound performance on Wayland using KDE Plasma specifically. The behavior is rather inconsistent between distros and desktop environments, but Wayland is consistently equal or faster than X. X especially suffers when it runs a compositor in the background, and only GNOME has avoided doing that consistently. Despite turning off the compositor, it never runs quite as fast as I have seen on Wayland. This to me suggests that there is still some unnecessary work being done that steals resources from the game. In spite of this, I would still settle on X for now, as it at least doesn't feel like it suffers from latency the way Wayland does, though I'd love to see this not be the case.

One article suggests that Wayland is actually more responsive in composited desktop cases, though this seems largely inconsequential for gaming.

Are there some other quirks in the Linux desktop scene that may impact responsiveness in games?

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