NVIDIA's Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing
In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer's conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency.
X.Org vs. Wayland latency across different compositors and desktop environments has been a heated topic among passionate Linux desktop enthusiasts. Some argue in favor of classic X.Org delivering the lowest latency while others routinely share their own personal anecdotes and argue in favor of modern Wayland solutions. NVIDIA engineer Kamil Łysik took to a Wayland vs. X.Org latency comparison from key press to presentation. For ensuring accurate measurements, a micro-controller was used along with a light sensor for end-to-end measurements. Paired with software for repeatable and automated testing.
Testing with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card and using the company's R610 driver branch, tests were done on KDE KWin 6.7.4 and GNOME Mutter 49.7 and the X.Org Server tests using v1.21.1.24.
NVIDIA latency Wayland vs. X.Org results
NVIDIA's findings were that the latency results between X.Org and Wayland are very close with it being hard to conclude a clear winner. Some notable takeaways include that XWayland no longer introduces extra frame delays where it had in the past with an extra frame latency. Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) was also measured to "drastically improve" responsiveness and deliver roughly the same latency between both X.Org and Wayland based sessions.
Those interested can find the NVIDIA presentation this X.Org vs. Wayland latency topic embedded above.
RedSnt ♾️🦋♂️👓🖥️
in reply to SocialistVibes01 • • •Someone in the comments of the Phoronix article linked to the whole slideshow:
indico.freedesktop.org/event/1…
Seemingly Xorg ever so slightly beat wayland, objectively from the results, but I think given a larger sample size it could just as easily have gone the other way.
So that's good. Although if Wayland was way better than Xorg that would also be good of course.
XWayland not sucking as much as it used to is also good news.
Nanook
in reply to SocialistVibes01 • •HaraldvonBlauzahn
in reply to SocialistVibes01 • • •Mikelius
in reply to SocialistVibes01 • • •On my really old gaming laptop, I had to force X because Wayland refused to use the video card drivers for games, so everything would end up on the CPU.
On my main gaming machine, I have to manually run nvidia-smi to make Wayland recognize the video card is still there before I start a game, otherwise it attempts to run games on the CPU.
There's definitely some work that needs to be done. That being said, when it does work, I have no gripes. I just hate the fact it really really wants to use the CPU instead of the (Nvidia) graphics cards for graphical things by default.