Phoronix published the results of comparing the performance of gaming applications running in Wayland and X.org-based environments in Ubuntu 21.10 on a system with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 graphics card. The games included 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 performed at screen resolutions of 3840x2160 and 1920x1080 for both native Linux builds of games and for Windows games launched using the Proton + DXVK bundle.
On average, games in a Wayland-based GNOME session experienced 4% higher FPS than in a GNOME-on-X.org session. In most tests, KDE 5.22.5 was slightly behind GNOME 40.5 when using Wayland, but outperformed when using X.Org in most 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 Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Wayland-based KDE tests failed due to game crashes. In HITMAN 2, when using KDE, regardless of the graphics subsystem, there was an abnormal more than twofold lag behind GNOME and Xfce.
Xfce was tested only with X.org and was in last place in most measurements, with the exception of tests of the game Strange Brigade at 1920x1080, in which Xfce came out on top both when running native builds of the game and when using the Proton layer. At the same time, in the test with a resolution of 3840 Γ 2160, Xfce was in last place. This test was also notable because the KDE Wayland session outperformed GNOME.
In games that support OpenGL and Vulkan, the FPS was about 15% higher when using Vulkan.
In addition, results have been published comparing the performance of various games and test applications using Linux kernels 5.15.10 and 5.16-rc on laptops with Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and Ryzen 5 5500U processors. Benchmarks showed measurable performance gains (between 2 and 14%) using the Linux 5.16 kernel, which persisted regardless of the Mesa version (22.0-dev was used in the final test). The 5.16 kernel release is expected on January 10th. Exactly what change in the 5.16 kernel resulted in a performance increase is not clear, but it is assumed to be a combination of improvements related to CPU usage in the task scheduler and optimizations for Radeon Vega GPU support in the AMDGPU driver.
Additionally, we can note the release of the AMDVLK graphics driver, which provides an implementation of the Vulkan graphics API developed by AMD. Prior to the discovery of the code, the driver was supplied as part of the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver set and competed with the open source RADV Vulkan driver developed by the Mesa project. As of 2017, the AMDVLK driver code is open source 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 (Ubuntu 21.04 experienced a 40% performance drop in a Wayland-based session compared to Ubuntu 20.04 with an X.Org session ).
Source: opennet.ru