XWayland Linux Gaming Performance With GNOME Wayland On Fedora 21

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XWayland Linux Gaming Performance With GNOME Wayland On Fedora 21

With this week's Fedora 21 Alpha release delivering the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver code, the newest Wayland code, and the updated GNOME 3.14 desktop with its day-to-day support for Wayland, I've been busy benchmarking.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20956

[kaprikawn]

...More interesting will be to see how the native Wayland gaming experience compares as more software begins to work out-of-the-box on Wayland without any X11 dependencies...

Definitely this.

Are there any current viable options for testing Wayland vs X for gaming? Could we use Dolphin for example (which is working on Wayland as I understand)?

Is it trivial to run anything on Wayland that uses SDL2?

[paintbynumbers]

Definitely this.

Are there any current viable options for testing Wayland vs X for gaming? Could we use Dolphin for example (which is working on Wayland as I understand)?

Is it trivial to run anything on Wayland that uses SDL2?

If the application is already using the current SDL2 (2.0.3) or you can get it load it via LD_PRELOAD then all that is required is to add this to the environment:

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland

I tried it against one steam game I had and there appears to be some issues but it did load up Wayland native.

[blackout23]

I think some Gnome developer mentioned a few month ago that the necessary compositor bypassing etc. has not been implemented, yet.

[drago01]

Wrong conclusion

The performance overhead of running on a Wayland session and going through XWayland for these older OpenGL applications is still very noticeable.

This is not the case. The reason for that is that games under wayland run composited (no matter whether there are running native or using xwayland). The performance "overhead" of xwayland is pretty much non existent. On X we do unredirect games so they do run uncompisted means that they run faster.

I do have patches for mutter to do the same on wayland (weston already does this btw.) but they didn't get finished in time for 3.14.

[Fidelix]

This is not the case. The reason for that is that games under wayland run composited (no matter whether there are running native or using xwayland). The performance "overhead" of xwayland is pretty much non existent. On X we do unredirect games so they do run uncompisted means that they run faster.

I do have patches for mutter to do the same on wayland (weston already does this btw.) but they didn't get finished in time for 3.14.

Fantastic. Thank you for this info.

[rikkinho]

hm

xmir is better

[kaprikawn]

xmir is better

Just wait until systemd gets a display server, that'll be better than both of them.

displayserverd ftw

[kalrish]

While modern versions of Mesa support OpenGL 3.3 for Radeon Gallium3D, when running the tests under the Wayland session only OpenGL 3.0 was being exposed off the same Mesa build.

This bug may be related. In EGL versions prior to 1.5 (which Mesa does not implement), the EGL_KHR_create_context extension is needed to create contexts with a minor number (or other flags).

[uid313]

XWayland for gaming?

Can XWayland even be used for gaming?

I thought that XWayland did not support OpenGL contexts.
That it could only be used for application software.