The Phoronix resource published results comparing the performance of gaming applications running in environments based on Wayland and X.org in Ubuntu 21.10 on a system with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 graphics card. The testing involved games such as Total War: Three Kingdoms, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, HITMAN 2, Xonotic, Strange Brigade, Left 4 Dead 2, Batman: Arkham Knight, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and F1 2020. Tests were conducted at resolutions of 3840×2160 and 1920×1080 for both native Linux versions of the games and Windows games running using the Proton + DXVK combination.
On average, the games in the GNOME session based on Wayland demonstrated FPS that was 4% higher than in the GNOME session running on X.org. In most tests, KDE 5.22.5 slightly lagged behind GNOME 40.5 when using Wayland, but outperformed it when using X.org in the majority of game tests (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, F1 2020, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Left 4 Dead 2, Xonotic, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Strange Brigade).
For the games 'Total War: Three Kingdoms' and 'Shadow of the Tomb Raider,' tests on KDE based on Wayland could not be completed due to game crashes. In HITMAN 2, when using KDE, regardless of the graphics subsystem, there was an unusual lag of more than twice compared to GNOME and Xfce.
Xfce was tested only with X.org and ranked last in most measurements, except for tests of the game Strange Brigade at a resolution of 1920×1080, where Xfce took first place both when running the native versions of the game and when using the Proton layer. However, in the test with a resolution of 3840×2160, Xfce ended up in last place. This test was also notable for the fact that the Wayland session of KDE outperformed GNOME.
In games supporting OpenGL and Vulkan, using Vulkan resulted in FPS being approximately 15% higher.
Additionally, results have been published comparing the performance of various games and benchmark applications using Linux kernels 5.15.10 and 5.16-rc on laptops with Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and Ryzen 5 5500U processors. The tests showed a noticeable performance increase (from 2% to 14%) when using kernel 5.16, which remains consistent regardless of the Mesa version (the final test used the 22.0-dev branch). The release of kernel 5.16 is expected on January 10. It is unclear which specific change in kernel 5.16 led to the performance increase; it is assumed to be a combination of enhancements related to CPU utilization in the task scheduler and optimizations for Radeon Vega GPU support in the AMDGPU driver.
Additionally, it is worth noting the release of the AMDVLK graphics driver, which provides an implementation of the Vulkan graphics API developed by AMD. Before the code was opened, the driver was packaged as part of the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver suite and competed with the open-source Vulkan driver RADV developed by the Mesa project. Since 2017, the AMDVLK driver code has been open under the MIT license. The new release is notable for supporting the Vulkan 1.2.201 specification, implementing the Vulkan extension VK_EXT_global_priority_query, and addressing performance issues in Wayland-based environments (in Ubuntu 21.04, a 40% performance drop was observed in Wayland sessions compared to Ubuntu 20.04 with X.Org sessions).
Source: opennet.ru
