X.Org and Wayland are the two mainstream display servers on the Linux platform, so who is better in Linux gaming performance? Phoronix, a foreign technology media, has tested a number of games on Ubuntu 22.10.
This review was conducted on Ubuntu 22.10 running GNOME 43.1, with NVIDIA R525 drivers and the latest open source AMD Radeon Linux drivers installed, testing the performance of X.Org/X11-based games first, and then Wayland.
On the AMD side, Linux 6.2 Git and Mesa 23.1-devel code from Oibaf PPA were used, along with the latest Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card for testing. On the NVIDIA side is their latest v525.85.05 public driver release, while using a GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.
The games for this test.
- Cyberpunk 2077 (Cyberpunk 2077)
- Dust Rally 2.0 (DiRT Rally 2.0)
- F1 22
- Grand Theft Auto 5 (Grand Theft Auto V)
- Hitman 3
- Metro Last Light Redux
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Total War: Three Kingdoms
- X-Plane 12
- DDraceNetwork
- Quake 2 RTX
- Tesseract
- Xonotic
- Unvanquished
The tests showed that Wayland games performed better with AMD Radeon graphics and Intel integrated graphics, but X.org performed better with the R525 series of Nvidia graphics drivers.
In the different games tested, frame rates dropped by about 16% when switching from a GNOME X.Org session to Mutter with Wayland. NVIDIA continues to work on improving its support for Wayland, so it will be interesting to see how this performance difference changes over the course of 2023.
