6 ms·

Awesome article. I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back. Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in m

by prhn 2mo ago

Awesome article. I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back. Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions. I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity. I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there. Now the author's got me thinking about gaming-optimized kernels, which I did not realize was a thing. I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.

marinhero 2mo ago
I moved to OpenSuse and have the same experience/opinion. The only caveat I had in Wayland is Game Streaming. Sunshine/Moonlight work but the input lag is noticeable and there are artifacts in the game. I go back and forth between X11 and Wayland just because X11 better for game streaming but in time I'm sure I'll go full-time into Wayland.
- wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
  When you say game streaming, is this the steam streaming stack?
  - _kidlike 2mo ago
    sunshine + moonlight is the streaming stack. Steam's one is pretty bad, and still only works in X11.
- _kidlike 2mo ago
  I've set up sunshine + moonlight on Fedora KDE Wayland, and I've played remotely from a different country with unnoticeable input lag (using a gamepad, playing Cyberpunk). The whole thing is even behind WireGuard. I have very fast internet on both sides, both fiber to the home, with only the tablet running moonlight being on WiFi.
seanw444 2mo ago
As far as I'm aware, you get marginal FPS gains switching kernels. It helps some. It's just a matter of whether the effort is worth it to you. The main change is the scheduler: rather than trying to evenly distribute CPU time to processes, it will prioritize bursty processes. I've been a fan of Hyprland for gaming so far. Much more configurable for things like VRR/tearing and other precise tweaks via Gamescope than when I was on AwesomeWM with X11. Been especially nice having Lua for configuration, which finally feels very familiar with my AwesomeWM roots.
Aurornis 2mo ago
With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland. The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.
- jandrese 2mo ago
  The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.
  - horsawlarway 2mo ago
    ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation. And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other. --- Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.
    - JMKH42 2mo ago
      It doesn't matter. Whether you have a ping of 40 or a ping of 300, 3ms is 3ms and will mean you win a little less often. The saying we have in bike racing marginal gains is "leave no stone unturned, but turn over the big ones first" So sure, first make sure your internet connection is solid. Then make sure your hardware and game settings are optimizing FPS to a reasonable point of diminishing returns. Then make sure you don't use XWayland
    - DefineOutside 2mo ago
      You can genuinely feel just a few milliseconds of input latency with a mouse, it disconnects looking around with your physical actions. It's the same way you can feel the difference between low and high refresh rate monitors, even though you can't really count the frames themselves
tim-projects 2mo ago
I use gamescope on a separate TTY that directly launches either steam or heroic launcher. I find this works exceptionally well. No window manager needed as you are playing a game full screen anyway. It fixed some other things like HDR too but at a loss of the volume and brightness keys no longer working.
- Timon3 2mo ago
  That sounds very interesting, do you have any links or references on how you set it up?
  - tim-projects 2mo ago
    I just used an llm to configure bashrc at login to offer a menu to fire it off. Either steam heroic or CLI (logging in as a separate game user) Gamescope replaces X or Wayland so you just run it and then the app you want it to open
  - tremon 2mo ago
    Don't know about gamescope, but the core of my own wine launch script is basically this: if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ]; then /usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/dbus-launch "$(readlink -f $0)" "$1" -- -layout singleLayout fi pw-cli i || (pipewire & sleep .5 ;\ pipewire-media-session &\ pipewire-pulse &) cd "$DIR" exec unshare -rcn $ENGINE "$IMAGE" $ARGS and the rest of the script is about setting up the environment for the game: setting all the parameters used above, exporting the correct WINEPREFIX, mounting .iso's if required, etc.

by prhn 2mo ago

marinhero 2mo ago

I moved to OpenSuse and have the same experience/opinion. The only caveat I had in Wayland is Game Streaming. Sunshine/Moonlight work but the input lag is noticeable and there are artifacts in the game. I go back and forth between X11 and Wayland just because X11 better for game streaming but in time I'm sure I'll go full-time into Wayland.

wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
When you say game streaming, is this the steam streaming stack?
- _kidlike 2mo ago
  sunshine + moonlight is the streaming stack. Steam's one is pretty bad, and still only works in X11.
_kidlike 2mo ago
I've set up sunshine + moonlight on Fedora KDE Wayland, and I've played remotely from a different country with unnoticeable input lag (using a gamepad, playing Cyberpunk). The whole thing is even behind WireGuard. I have very fast internet on both sides, both fiber to the home, with only the tablet running moonlight being on WiFi.

seanw444 2mo ago

As far as I'm aware, you get marginal FPS gains switching kernels. It helps some. It's just a matter of whether the effort is worth it to you. The main change is the scheduler: rather than trying to evenly distribute CPU time to processes, it will prioritize bursty processes. I've been a fan of Hyprland for gaming so far. Much more configurable for things like VRR/tearing and other precise tweaks via Gamescope than when I was on AwesomeWM with X11. Been especially nice having Lua for configuration, which finally feels very familiar with my AwesomeWM roots.

Aurornis 2mo ago

With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland. The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.

jandrese 2mo ago
The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.
- horsawlarway 2mo ago
  ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation. And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other. --- Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.
  - JMKH42 2mo ago
    It doesn't matter. Whether you have a ping of 40 or a ping of 300, 3ms is 3ms and will mean you win a little less often. The saying we have in bike racing marginal gains is "leave no stone unturned, but turn over the big ones first" So sure, first make sure your internet connection is solid. Then make sure your hardware and game settings are optimizing FPS to a reasonable point of diminishing returns. Then make sure you don't use XWayland
  - DefineOutside 2mo ago
    You can genuinely feel just a few milliseconds of input latency with a mouse, it disconnects looking around with your physical actions. It's the same way you can feel the difference between low and high refresh rate monitors, even though you can't really count the frames themselves

tim-projects 2mo ago

I use gamescope on a separate TTY that directly launches either steam or heroic launcher. I find this works exceptionally well. No window manager needed as you are playing a game full screen anyway. It fixed some other things like HDR too but at a loss of the volume and brightness keys no longer working.

Timon3 2mo ago
That sounds very interesting, do you have any links or references on how you set it up?
- tim-projects 2mo ago
  I just used an llm to configure bashrc at login to offer a menu to fire it off. Either steam heroic or CLI (logging in as a separate game user) Gamescope replaces X or Wayland so you just run it and then the app you want it to open
- tremon 2mo ago
  Don't know about gamescope, but the core of my own wine launch script is basically this: if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ]; then /usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/dbus-launch "$(readlink -f $0)" "$1" -- -layout singleLayout fi pw-cli i || (pipewire & sleep .5 ;\ pipewire-media-session &\ pipewire-pulse &) cd "$DIR" exec unshare -rcn $ENGINE "$IMAGE" $ARGS and the rest of the script is about setting up the environment for the game: setting all the parameters used above, exporting the correct WINEPREFIX, mounting .iso's if required, etc.