GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Performance + Power Usage On Fedora 32 With AMD Renoir Laptop

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 14 June 2020 at 08:28 AM EDT. 178 Comments
FEDORA
As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32.

Here are a collection of metrics when testing the GNOME Wayland vs. X.Org performance and related power / usage statistics on Fedora Workstation 32 running off the Lenovo laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U.
Fedora 32 Wayland

On some systems we have found recent Firefox releases to perform better on Wayland, but in this case the results didn't yield any meaningful change:
Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

The memory usage during these Firefox browser tests did appear to be running lower with the X.Org session:
Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

The battery power consumption was unchanged between the sessions:
Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Meanwhile with the open-source Tesseract OpenGL game:
Fedora 32 Wayland

That Linux-native OpenGL game performed similarly between Wayland and X.Org.
Fedora 32 Wayland

Memory usage was slightly better still with X.Org.
Fedora 32 Wayland

There wasn't a meaningful difference for the power consumption.
Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

Fedora 32 Wayland

The Xonotic results were similar. Then other benchmarks were run like DarkTable, GIMP, and RawTherapee while continuing to monitor the memory usage, battery power draw, and performance. The performance in those other workloads was obviously unchanged but it was the overall RAM usage and power consumption we were most curious about:
Fedora 32 Wayland

Over the course of all the benchmarks ran, using the GNOME Wayland session led to ~200MB higher RAM usage compared to the X.Org session.
Fedora 32 Wayland

The battery power usage on this Ryzen 5 4500U laptop was basically the same: well, 0.3 Watts in favor of X.Org.
Fedora 32 Wayland

The system thermal performance obviously had no meaningful difference between the X.Org and Wayland sessions.

Hope those data points were interesting for those curious about the latest on Wayland vs. X.Org for laptops running an up-to-date Linux software stack... More AMD Renoir Linux mobile tests forthcoming.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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