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Posted by hoechst 7 hours ago

Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK(marco-nett.de)
333 points | 208 commentspage 4
shmerl 7 hours ago|
> A lot of people still use X11 over Wayland because Wayland is said to have much worse input lag

Wayland is fine. People should use AMD and KDE Plasma.

I'd avoid Nvidia to begin with.

BearOso 7 hours ago||
Yeah, this particular experiment doesn't reveal much because the Nvidia driver is a black box. We know in the past it used its "composition pipeline" in Wayland situations, and that was a particularly noticeable increase in latency. Plus, for a while the Nvidia driver also was stuck on software cursors. And even on the DRM path the big two compositors only updated input once every frame, which was the reason for it "to have much worse input lag."

edit: I should also point out the mouse acceleration curve, which if you don't fix it is different between X11 and Wayland compositors. That really messes up the "feel" of things.

bigyabai 7 hours ago||
AMD's Mesa drivers are better, but if you already have an Nvidia card then you can still use it just fine with Wayland.

The biggest hit is Vulkan performance (~20% less than Windows iirc) but for desktop and casual gaming use, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are perfectly fine.

tfrancisl 7 hours ago||
Seconding this. I'm not happy with the fact that the drivers are proprietary, I really prefer FOSS. But, I am tired of having to deal with FUD around performance and issues with NVIDIA devices which simply don't exist at scale.

I have friends who are stuck on Windows not because they play games with Windows-only anticheat, but because theyve been told by GNU heads that NVIDIA drivers simply don't perform acceptably on Linux.

im3w1l 6 hours ago|||
Firefox is software rendered on linux-nvidia which leads to a bizarre situation of simple web animations lagging on decent computers.
shmerl 6 hours ago|||
I'd say it's deserved, not FUD. Nvidia did improve in some ways, but it's still way too heavy into blob even in case you plan to use it in the future with nvk. Nouveau / nova developers explained that Nvidia pushed a lot more into their firmware than AMD, turning the kernel driver into more of a shim than an actual driver. That's already a big downside.
bigyabai 2 hours ago||
It's a tradeoff, and if you're not doing any fancy-pants CUDA work then it's a pretty big one. But most people are already using these blob-heavy drivers on Windows, so switching that same system to Linux is not a huge downgrade in terms of usability or stability. It isn't recommended for new Linux PCs, but it's not a dealbreaker for people switching OSes (anymore).
dosisking 6 hours ago||
I wonder how FreeBSD X11 compares to Linux X11
modeless 7 hours ago||
This is awesome. I would like to see tests like this done at 60 Hz as well, and also with non-3D apps. I suspect the results might look different in those conditions. A 500 Hz monitor is not the common case. 2ms is a whole frame!
ElijahLynn 6 hours ago||
Wow, love this!! This is what makes HN great!
hparadiz 7 hours ago||
Amazing work. Thank you for putting this together.
closeneough 6 hours ago||
How does Windows compare to this?
dreamlayers 7 hours ago||
Why isn't Wayland better than X11?
inigyou 5 hours ago||
It's defective by design, in a DRM kind of way. It's designed to lack features and make them difficult to implement.
seba_dos1 4 hours ago||
Because when it's done right it's not the compositor/display server that's the bottleneck.
overtone1000 7 hours ago||
This is why I read Hacker News. Thank you.
calvinmorrison 7 hours ago||
X11 is a protocol. Xorg is an end of life'd project run by the Wayland team.

Xlibre is an actively developed and maintained X11 protocol display server.

Xfree86 is dead, long live Xorg. Xorg is dead, long live Xlibre!

anthk 4 hours ago|
Xenocara does it better than XLibre.
feverzsj 6 hours ago|
Yes, we know wayland is not only slower but also with much less features.
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