GNOME XWayland Radeon Gaming Performance Is In Good Shape For Ubuntu 21.04

With Ubuntu 21.04 planning to use Wayland by default with GNOME aside from when running on NVIDIA graphics, you may be wondering about the current performance delta between running GNOME Shell on the X.Org session for Linux gaming versus its quite solid Wayland support. Or, rather, in the case of most games still - piped through XWayland. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland performance on Ubuntu with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

After last week's announcement of Canonical looking to use Wayland by default with Ubuntu 21.04, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the (X)Wayland performance relative to the default X.org Server 1.20 session. This round of benchmarks was using Ubuntu 20.10 with the latest GNOME 3.38.2 stable release updates while using Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.1.0-devel for the very latest Radeon Linux graphics stack and similar to what will be found with Ubuntu 21.04. As noted previously, Ubuntu 21.04 is also planning to stick to GNOME 3.38 for the Ubuntu 21.04 cycle.

Various Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out on the native X.Org session that is the current Ubuntu default and then shifting over to the GNOME Wayland session for looking at the (X)Wayland performance.

Benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite.