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Posted by hoechst 6 hours ago

Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK(marco-nett.de)
323 points | 195 commentspage 3
Telaneo 5 hours ago|
I have a vague memory of (X?)Wayland being much worse than X11 before, and some patch or protocol making it out to all the relevant implementations, but I might have imagined that, since these result show virtually no difference, and only XWayland shows a marginal difference.

Or maybe it just came out of nowhere and was never true.

Havoc 5 hours ago||
Using Wayland (hyprland) for daily driver and it's the happiest I've been with an OS in a long time on feel. Feels crisp in that spartan way that windows & macos just don't - no animations, taskbar, popups or god knows what else.
inigyou 4 hours ago||
I guess you'd feel the same in i3 or Xmonad as well.
bee_rider 4 hours ago||
That’s interesting. Hyprland, spartan? It’s the fancy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink tiling WM, isn’t it?
Havoc 3 hours ago||
Spartan...haha...I mean it's all relative. Certain relative to the other two boxes I use daily - macos & win.

I do know it is favoured by ricers with animations & transparency but I just use it to tile stuff. Think I selected it over sway & i3 due to wayland support at the time. Not sure.

eaf7e281 4 hours ago||
Really hope to see a Windows result. What if Windows has a latency of 10 ms+. xD
feverzsj 5 hours ago||
Yes, we know wayland is not only slower but also with much less features.
gfxfan 4 hours ago||
I wonder though, updated pixels might not have the same latency on the whole screen, and it might even be affected by some updates mechanisms, like panel replay. I.e. it would have been interesting to also measure the screen position as a dimension.

Also, both the input latency (usb controller, and its driver), and screen latency (input latency + processing + update delay) are supposedly also affecting all measurements, but hopefully somewhat consistent or at least filtered out.

PcChip 6 hours ago||
I saw a very similar post a month or two ago, is this the same author?

edit: no, this is the one I was remembering: https://farnoy.dev/posts/linux-latency

boomskats 5 hours ago||
A lot of people conflate Wayland being worse than X11 with Gnome on Wayland being worse than Gnome on X11.

Wayland has been great for me for a few years now. I don't use Gnome or nvidia though.

doubled112 5 hours ago|
If I understand the semantics of it all correctly, in that sense, there is no such thing as "Wayland". It is all a little bit confusing compared to the X11 ecosystem.

You don't run GNOME on Wayland. You run GNOME's Wayland compositor, which is an entirely different implementation than Plasma's Wayland compositor.

boomskats 4 hours ago||
That's what I mean though.

I've not used gnome for years, but I have a vague memory of gnome/mutter running on a single main thread which used to lock up quite a lot (javascript etc). And because in X it was X that used to manage things like rendering the mouse pointer every frame, whereas in Wayland it flipped to mutter having to do it directly, the stalls were way more obvious in wayland than X, which is where I think a lot of this perception came from.

Again, not sure how much of this is accurate, but that's the point I was trying to make.

seba_dos1 3 hours ago||
Yeah, I believe Mutter is directly responsible for a lot of bad rep Wayland gets. It got better in many areas, but the damage is done.
clodecloud 5 hours ago||
Linux is underrated and is only getting better. I am building a linux cloud platform so we can build unity and Godot games with mcps right in your browser. Not only is Linux the only option but I have realized it is the best option for AI
DarkmSparks 4 hours ago||
The main issue is with mouse movement rather than clicks tho...
Night_Thastus 4 hours ago|
Clicks and mouse movement do have different latency, but it doesn't matter for this test. The click is the constant part to show relative positioning of X11/wayland/low latency/vrr/etc. The relative performance should be the same ranking for mouse movement, just with different exact values.
DarkmSparks 3 hours ago||
Different order of magnitude in my experience.

Wayland mouse movement lag is/can be/could/was in the order of several hundred milliseconds.

Its that that people notice, not 3 or 4ms difference in click response.

dosisking 4 hours ago|
I wonder how FreeBSD X11 compares to Linux X11
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