NVIDIA Linux Gaming Performance For Wayland vs. X.Org On Ubuntu 22.04

With NVIDIA's newly-introduced 510 Linux driver series paired with the latest XWayland and a modern Wayland compositor like the newest GNOME/Mutter packages, the NVIDIA (X)Wayland experience is in great shape and delivering comparable performance to a traditional X.Org session. The NVIDIA Wayland support with GBM usage has stabilized and appears to be in good shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are some benchmarks of the NVIDIA 510 driver on the current state of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

In the past we've looked at the Radeon Linux gaming performance for X.Org vs. Wayland. Modern Wayland support in the likes of KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell have worked out well with that open-source Radeon driver stack. Now with the latest NVIDIA drivers, their Wayland support is in good shape too.

This round of testing was using a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 while testing an array of games and settings while ensuring the games were not being GPU-bottlenecked. The NVIDIA 510.47.03 Linux driver was at play along with the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS daily packages that have the newest (X)Wayland code as well as GNOME Shell 41.3 and other updated components.

The Linux gaming benchmarks using a mix of native Linux games as well as Steam Play titles were then carried out under the GNOME Wayland session and then again under the GNOME X.Org session for seeing how the (X)Wayland performance is looking ahead of this all-important Ubuntu Long Term Support release. Overall it's in good shape and will hopefully be the default for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, similar to the default seen with the open-source Intel and Radeon graphics drivers.