Hi
I have a question and would like some answer please
I see a lot of people saying that wayland is above x11, personally I play competitive games, and I don’t understand why many place wayland above x11, in all situations I feel much less input lag with x11, x11 is much more responsive with games, even with vrr from wayland, I would like to have explanations thank you
Could be related to a sync to vblank problem.
There are probably things that are not disabled by gpu driver on wayland, therefore issues are half way, where the DE shows disabled, but not on the GPU driver.
If you play competitive games, turn VRR off. VRR limit your fps which increase latency and frame time. Having 400+ fps on a 240+hz will give better result than having VRR on.
For competitve players, X may be more desirable. X don’t have “vsync” enabled by default which is what you want. If you are on Wayland, chances are that your game is redirected to X using XWayland (unless you activated wayland on proton or playing a native game that support wayland if those exist)
From my understanding, using XWayland is not that bad but still introduce minimal input lag / Latency. It’s ok for single player games but may be too much for competitive players.
If you are using KDE, check the “Screen tearing: Allow in fullscreen windows” box, it will help:
I play fighting games that are locked at 60fps, I have a 360hz screen, when I use wayland I always activate VRR, without it the latency was even worse!
with x11 I don’t use any synchronization and the input lag is much lower. with wayland this is impossible because as I said the input lag is horrible, I think that for solo games wayland is the best, after maybe I forgot something in my wayland settings
I’ve played many competives games styles (starcraft, warcraft, counter strike, dota, leagues, PUBG, valorant, overwatch, rocket league and even more) in my life, but I never played fighting games! I suck real bad at these.
60fps cap is boring
I have a weird idea I would try if I were in your situation. I would set my display to 60hz instead of 360hz and disable VRR. But it my not change anything.
Are you using a weird USB adapter with your fight stick? Sometimes these have weird input lag that is less noticeable on Windows, but shows up on different Linux configs.
The only competitive game I play right now is Deadlock, and I haven’t noticed any input lag on Wayland. Every time I miss a Vindicta ult, I am 100% sure I missed it and it wasn’t input lag.
If you use certain env vars to disable things on nvidia and other parts, that could be why too, as I mentioned in the other post.
Because just as nvidia-settings does not work on wayland, If I am not mistaken it’s env vars are also not read.
Isn’t about only input lag , but compatibility too.
Wayland always gave me some issues and I don’t have Nvidia card but Radeon 7800XT
Good example Jedi:Survivor. With Wayland had crashes , with X11 only once. And no crashes to any other games I tested
Means for me, Wayland isn’t ready for gaming. Maybe have passed 15 years existence, but still looking experimental than a final version.So for me, jump to Wayland for someone who play games , isn’t wise. Stick with X11. It just works as must should be. I have KDE-Plasma in my installation but still I chose X11 session.
I’m actually playing Jedi Survivor on a 7600 on Wayland right now with not too many crashes, just bought it in the Winter sale. It crashed once on the opening video, and once in the game after about 5 hours of play.
I started using Wayland when it became the default for KDE 6, haven’t noticed much difference.
I tried both at length, and I can say that for competitive gaming, x11 meets my expectations more, wayland offers from my experience better image fluidity but the input lag is much too high, wayland for single player games must be better in my opinion
Shared experiences might be different given their setup / configurations done.
Wayland are usable for everything else, as it works very well. Even with games, so far, the games I that tried, didnt have any crash problems.
Exception that X11 does better in the gaming if you want better performance and responsiveness. Might be better because due to better GPU utilization. Which comes back to the vblank or related possible problem.
Eh, I used to be Diamond in s6 League of Legends, up there in Quake, etc. If I wanted to sit here and grind games all day like I did in the past, I don’t really see anything stopping me from doing so on Wayland.
A few months back I was playing Street Fighter 4 and I was hitting 1 frame links on Rolento with no problems. Nothing is gaming is more affected by input lag than 1 frame links on fighting games.
Wayland doesn’t automatically give input lag, just some hardware configs. If you were on a Ryzen 1 mobo from 2017 like I am I bet the drivers would be mature enough for no input lag on your setup.
It’s just luck of the draw really. If your motherboard is AMD and 5+ years old it helps a lot.
I was just testing out some other games.
I noticed that the games that X11 seem to “fix” are DX11 (DXVK) games, but Wayland seems to work properly in DX12 or straight Vulkan rendered games.
But I cant confirm about the input lag part here, as they all were sinple player games, and you cannot truly expect them to be optimized in those parts. Only in the mp “competitive” games.
Since you complained about competitive games, does it also mean DX11?
Because in my case the one case that I shared that X11 fixed all issues were a DX11 game.
Only competitive game I really play is Deadlock, and I haven’t noticed any Wayland input lag on DX11 or Vulkan.
This probably isn’t the best example, as the game is made by Valve, the people who turbo boosted Linux gaming. I could see it happening on a lot of NVIDIA / newer machines, but input lag free Wayland gaming is possible.
Not sure with nvidia.
If I am not mistaken, just as the UI, all the environment variables that can be used on X11 to disable certain things, does not work on wayland, so things could be hard enabled there.
Keeping certain things enabled like vsync / synctovblank.
That could be a reason for input lag on Wayland.
and there is no possibility of deactivating vsync/ synctovblank on wayland??
Of course there is.
Relevant wayland protocol:
wlroots implementation:
Run-time toggling e.g. in labwc (wlroots-based) (allowTearing
):
change to yes
, along with
<keybind key="W-F12">
<action name="ToggleTearing" />
</keybind>
done, tested, works.
KDE Plasma and AFAIR GNOME also support tearing (aka no-vsync).
Gnome are in the process of implementing it. KDE have it.
But like I said, it would most likely be in the GPU driver side, at least with nvidia, don’t know about AMD.
Also don’t know the effects on the proton/wine side in which they are also working on, to be released in wine version 10, with bugs fixed.
Here is where I described a similar behavior in between X11 and Wayland, which could be related to the GPU driver only or possibly hidden mix between DE and GPU.
This is where it could be related to this in the DE. Because it is disabled on X11, not sure how it works on Wayland. But in the end, it is just noticed patterns, I am unsure if it’s an actual problem or not.
If the problem were to be on the DE, it could be that the implementation are not completed/finished, just as VRR on wayland can be laggy / buggy.
I have all that are known, set to disable gsync / vrr / vsync, yet it doesnt have an effect on wayland.