Kamil Łysik, who works at NVIDIA, presented at the XDC 2026 conference, where he discussed the results of testing information output delays in GNOME 49.7 (mutter) and KDE 6.7.4 (kwin) environments using X.Org Server and Wayland. The code used in the study was released under the MIT license.
Overall, the conclusions suggest that the differences in responsiveness are insignificant, making it difficult to identify a single winner. According to Kamil, the greatest influence on delays comes from input processing and output organization to the monitor. Notably, the technology for adaptive refresh rate (VRR) significantly increased responsiveness when enabled. The previously encountered delays with XWayland testing have been resolved; no additional delays were recorded in the new XWayland codebase.
The proposed method for evaluating interface responsiveness is similar to a study conducted by Mark Nett in July. As in the previous study, a specialized hardware device based on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller was used for accurate measurement of the time from keypress to information change on the screen, along with a photodiode to detect brightness changes on the screen, simulating USB keyboard functionality. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card and LG 27GN950 monitor were utilized for output. The system used the Linux kernel 7.1.7 along with the proprietary NVIDIA driver set 610.57.04.
Izvor: opennet.ru
