Fedora 21 Gaming Benchmarks: X.Org vs. XWayland To End 2014

As some extra benchmarks over the holidays, here's some fresh numbers when running some OpenGL gaming tests on GNOME running natively on X.Org vs. GNOME on Wayland and the games running through XWayland.

As my most recent benchmarks were from (X)Wayland on Fedora 21 from its pre-release form in September, before ending out the year I figured it's time to run some new reference tests with all available Fedora 21 updates. Fedora 21 was tested with the GNOME on its X.Org Server and GNOME on Wayland sessions available via the F21 GDM log-in screen. The tests in question were running through XWayland to look at the overhead for this approach of running legacy X11 games/applications on Wayland.

Tests were done from an ASUS Zenbook with Intel HD 4000 graphica via the Intel Core i7 3517U "Ivy Bridge" processor. Fedora 21 was running with the Linux 3.17.7 kernel, X.Org Server 1.16.3 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.99.916, and Mesa 10.4.0.

These straight-forward performance tests looking at the current performance overhead of XWayland on Fedora 21 can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. From the limited tests run, overall there wasn't much difference percentage wise compared to the tests we ran a few months ago with the (X)Wayland performance causing a small but measurable drop in performance.