Kamil Łysik, working at NVIDIA, spoke at the XDC 2026 conference presenting the results of testing the output latency in GNOME 49.7 (mutter) and KDE 6.7.4 (kwin) environments while using X.Org Server and Wayland. The code involved in the research was released under the MIT license.
Overall, the conclusions suggest that the differences in responsiveness are not significant and it's hard to single out a clear winner. According to Kamil, the main factors affecting latency are input processing and monitor output organization. The technology of adaptive refresh rate (VRR) was separately noted, where its implementation significantly improved responsiveness. Issues with latency previously encountered in past tests with XWayland have been resolved — no additional delays were recorded in the new XWayland codebase.
The proposed method for assessing interface responsiveness is similar to the study conducted by Mark Nette in July. As in the previous study, a special hardware device based on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller was used to accurately measure the time from key press to display change; a photodiode was connected to detect brightness changes on the screen, simulating USB keyboard functionality. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card and LG 27GN950 monitor were used for output. The system employed Linux kernel 7.1.7 and a set of proprietary NVIDIA drivers 610.57.04.
Zdroj: opennet.ru
