Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Session Performance Impact For Gaming

Feral's latest Shadow of the Tomb Raider game saw similar performance on GNOME 3.36 under X.Org and with (X)Wayland.

One of the rare games still showing a performance difference was the Steam Play-based Strange Brigade game that natively uses Vulkan. At least the performance hit wasn't too bad compared to the original XWayland performance penalties of years ago.

Sans Strange Brigade as the main outlier, the Steam Linux gaming performance with AMD Radeon graphics was similar on GNOME 3.36 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS between the X.Org and Wayland based desktop sessions. While the X.Org session is remaining the default for this long-term support Ubuntu release, the Wayland-based session can be easily used by selecting it from the GDM log-in screen and in our testing thus far is working out quite well.