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Tearing protocol merged for XWayland. Wayland gets closer to being suitable for gaming purposes (gitlab.freedesktop.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1458833

Many Linux users have cited Wayland's forced vsync as a blocker for gaming related scenarios. This patch adds tearing support into Xwayland!

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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (5 children)

As someone who games exclusively (okay, except fucking PUBG) on Linux and Wayland for two years now, I find the implicit claim that (x)Wayland would not be suitable for Linux pretty misleading. The problem is that this is repeated a lot throughout the community, mainly by people who haven't tried it recently. However, good for the few people that need that feature!

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    I feel like you're just doing the same thing but from the other side. You're dismissing other people's experiences with Wayland simply because it doesn't line up with what you're personally seeing on your specific hardware.

    On my Radeon 680M, Wayland has been an absolute no-go for gaming in terms of input latency and frame pacing. I tried it with Valheim and God of War in KDE Wayland and the performance is drastically worse than KDE X11. Other games like Spiderman Miles Morales show less of a performance gap, but it's still there. And yes I tried it very recently.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    That's not my intention at all, in fact, I really welcome such contributions with precise examples, so thank you for providing one! Hardware is a good point, my GPU is a 6800XT which I bought right at release. Played all kinds of games but actually none if the ones you listed. Some working examples on my system:

    • World of Tanks, World of Warships
    • AC Valhalla
    • RDR2
    • Anno 1800
    • AoE2
    • Back4Blood
    • Control

    All of this on Arch Linux with a 5900X CPU. Hope the combination of our comments gives OP a picture :)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago*

    Haha, sorry if I came out a bit strong in my previous comment. I daily drive Linux on all the machines I game on and I do want to see Wayland succeed, especially in the gaming space. This is why I find the merge request I linked to in the main post (I am OP btw) so exciting! And we do already see Wayland working really well on the Steam Deck due to Valve putting in some extra magic sauce (like the aforementioned tearing support), so I have no doubt that Wayland will get there on desktop eventually.

    my GPU is a 6800XT

    This makes me wonder whether the input latency issues are more noticeable on lower-end cards running at lower framerates. It makes sense that that could be the case. A 6800XT might be brute forcing through some of the inefficiencies that would otherwise be visible on a dinky little APU like my Radeon 680M. You also have a pretty beefy CPU, so I am also wondering whether that has an effect on how certain Wayland compositors deliver frames. For example, in Valheim, it isn't just simple input latency issues, the frame delivery is actually worse somehow, with visible stuttering.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Did you do performance comparisons between Wayland and X11, or is your metric subjective?

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    Completely subjective, I represent the average semi-casual gamer that is limited by skill, not lag. So for all these games I can just tell I did not notice any lag that annoyed me (and everything ran on my 144Hz monitor) and that there have been no framerate drops (to that, I am susceptible)

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