Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

https://marco-nett.de/blog/measuring-input-latency-on-linux-x11-vs-wayland-vrr-dxvk/

by hoechst • 9 days ago

404 290 9 days ago

This is why I read Hacker News. Thank you.

cgyvbunji2• 9 days ago

He seems confused at the end why people think wayland is so slow, but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result? People were probably running x11 games on wayland and noticed that significant lag. Just a wild guess. Very nice article, wish people did actual measurements like this more often, of all sorts of things.

superkuh2• 9 days ago

You can't just test one wayland compositor and talk about the performance of all wayland compositors. They're vastly different, especially when it comes to the extensions to wayland needed to handle input devices (ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/). It's not like how xorg is the standard strong reference implementation for X11 everywhere that works the same everywhere.

What's probably happening is that other wayland compositors are slower than KDE Plasma wayland which he tested. And people report that experience. Some other wayland compositors might even be faster than plasma. But what is for sure is that every wayland is very different from every other wayland.

hparadiz2• 9 days ago

You will also get different results by gpu, compiler, kernel, architecture, and then of course compositor. Even a slightly different version of some lib might throw off the results.

In any case the methodology in the post is sound and should be used for benchmarking in the future.

zamalek• 9 days ago

And FWIW, KDE probably make the most effort with their compositor. They have historically been well ahead of the curve for things that might affect this (e.g. VRR).

datakan2• 9 days ago

I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.

tapoxi• 9 days ago

I mean normally this type of discussion is silly, but in playing competitive shooters latency does make a huge difference, and it shows that XWayland is adding ~4ms of latency.

There is a native Wayland driver for Wine/Proton but it's enabled through an environment variable, not by default. This will probably be default in Wine 12/Proton 12 because Valve wants to squeeze as much performance out of SteamOS as possible. The gaming mode UI runs under Valve's own Wayland compositor (gamescope) already, but games are currently in nested XWayland windows.

wing-_-nuts10• 9 days ago

My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves.

All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false.

I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.

doix• 9 days ago

This is the complete opposite of those discussions. It's taking a specific quantifiable thing and measuring it, with enough information for anyone to try and reproduce the results.

It's the epitome of science, comparing it to a generic vim vs emacs flamewar which is pure subjective opinion is pretty baseless.

umanwizard2• 9 days ago

It's really not like Emacs/vim. I use X because it works on my setup and always has, whereas Wayland has not, despite Wayland advocates claiming it's ready and X is deprecated for 10+ years.

michaelmrose6• 8 days ago

No. Wayland has been in development for 17 years. People have been claiming its been ready for prime time when it wasn't for a surprising portion of that time while it had substantial deficiencies while the boring old shit continued to work fine.

It has been ready for users whose sole usage is an editor a terminal and a browser on their single screen intel laptop as long as they didn't also open youtube since 2015.

Imagine the boss's nephew joins the firm. He knows less than nothing and is worse than useless everything he touches turns to shit. People understandably complain. After 10 years of development and other people's time he is now moderately capable at his job. People still bitch. They aren't lying or wrong. They just aren't current.

PunchyHamster• 8 days ago

well according to post, coz they are very similar. but xwayland doubles it

which is still half a frame at best so I think any blame here would be just on a particular game being slow on inputs

wasmperson2• 8 days ago

Sure Wayland works fine. What you're not seeing is the hours and hours of volunteer labor wasted to get it to that point. Time that could have been spent working on features users actually cared about, now wasted "adding wayland support" to your favorite applications. If you could quantify it, the waste would be borderline criminal:

- Effort spent writing sway that could have been spent improving i3

- Effort spent writing GNOME-Wayland that could have been spent improving GNOME

- Effort spent writing KDE-Wayland that could have been spent improving KDE (much of this work duplicated effort with GNOME-Wayland)

- Effort spent writing wlroots to try and mitigate the effort being wasted by people writing bespoke compositors

- Wine/Proton devs needing to waste time getting every windows application to work in Wayland

- Firefox needing to target both Wayland and X

- A bunch of graphical toolkits and window managers that were working perfectly fine but will now be "left behind" since they lack the maintainers to support a porting effort

- low-level toolkits like SDL needing to implement their own window decorations now that they're not guaranteed to be provided by the OS (what?!)

What Wayland proves to me is just how easy it is for a small number of developers to unintentionally sabotage productivity in a much larger project.

saxonww• 8 days ago

To put it in perspective: an average eye blink is 100-150 ms. The worst outcome in this test was with XWayland adding 3ms of latency. Maybe this is truly important for some exceptional pro gamers but for the majority of the world it is as you say, stupid and pointless.

FeepingCreature3• 8 days ago

try to share your screen on a native tool older than a few years lol

account426• 8 days ago

Ignorance is not something to be celebrated.

retatop• 9 days ago

Isn't Wayland always one frame delayed compared to Xorg to avoid tearing or has that been changed? If so, his very high refresh rate would minimize that effect

hackernudes• 9 days ago

I don't think there was ever a design to be one frame behind.

Compositing requires the GPU to do some extra work to draw the frame to be presented. This typically takes very little time (much less than a full frame period). Additionally, most wayland compositors will bypass that extra step if an application is full screen (wlroots calls it "direct scanout").

Also some wayland compositors keep track of timing and delay the final composition until right before it is time to present the frame in order to reduce latency.

seba_dos18• 8 days ago

Tearing can theoretically improve latency for the part of the screen that's below the tear, but in any case where you could actually benefit from it the difference would be at least order of magnitude smaller than the duration of one frame.

Aurornis4• 9 days ago

and noticed that significant lag

Only xwayland showed that result. The difference was only a couple milliseconds. That’s in the range where I start to doubt that people are feeling the latency difference. If it was 10-20ms I could believe it, but not when it’s a couple milliseconds.

The author of this post did a good job of getting all of the other confounding settings out of the way. It’s possible that the people complaining that Wayland was slow were starting from an unoptimized situation and as part of switching to some low latency variant they set all the correct settings.

cgyvbunji2• 9 days ago

You might be right, 8 ms of total end to end latency is about 1 frame at 120 hz or half a frame of 60 hz, someone would need to be quite competitive to notice that. And the baseline was 4 ms, so going from half a frame of total e2e latency at 120 hz to 1 frame, not much of a difference. Also in 2026 I'm realizing it might be doubtful that many games would still be only x11, so I'm not sure how common it would be to encounter xwayland in a game today realistically.

mikenew• 9 days ago

Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time.

I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.

TheTon• 8 days ago

I think the author’s use of a 500Hz display covers up or minimizes a lot of issues. It’s really easy to look at this data and say 8ms click to flash is fabulous even though he has an config that does 4ms.

A better way to interpret this data is to normalize by the vsync interval or the swap chain depth. The slowest config is 2 frames slower than the fastest. At 500Hz this is 4ms extra which is likely imperceptible to everyone but elite pro gamers. At 60Hz this is 34ms extra which is pretty noticeable to even casual gamers.

its-summertime• 8 days ago

the statements of wayland being slow or not need a lot of context: what version of the game they played, the display server, the game settings, the display server settings, the monitor's feature set, the video card's feature set, the video card driver version, etc.

hulitu• 8 days ago

but don't you think it's because of his xwayland result

No. Wayland is slow on its own. You can test it without Xwayland.

hparadiz2• 9 days ago

Amazing work. Thank you for putting this together.

shmerl2• 9 days ago

A lot of people still use X11 over Wayland because Wayland is said to have much worse input lag

Wayland is fine. People should use AMD and KDE Plasma.

I'd avoid Nvidia to begin with.

bigyabai2• 9 days ago

AMD's Mesa drivers are better, but if you already have an Nvidia card then you can still use it just fine with Wayland.

The biggest hit is Vulkan performance (~20% less than Windows iirc) but for desktop and casual gaming use, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are perfectly fine.

tfrancisl• 9 days ago

Seconding this. I'm not happy with the fact that the drivers are proprietary, I really prefer FOSS. But, I am tired of having to deal with FUD around performance and issues with NVIDIA devices which simply don't exist at scale.

I have friends who are stuck on Windows not because they play games with Windows-only anticheat, but because theyve been told by GNU heads that NVIDIA drivers simply don't perform acceptably on Linux.

qu4z-22• 8 days ago

I specifically bought an AMD card for my living room Steam box, and I've had way more driver issues with that computer than when it had an nVidia card (although there's also other software changes). Mostly: the audio hitches frequently when outputting via HDMI, and a many-year-old AMD driver bug where it will always prefer YUV to RGB when supported by the display with no kernel parameters or anything to override (this one is apparently finally getting fixed in 7.2 hopefully). That said, I've had some issues with the nVidia drivers too, and I much prefer open source ones, ceteris paribus.

BearOso• 9 days ago

Yeah, this particular experiment doesn't reveal much because the Nvidia driver is a black box. We know in the past it used its "composition pipeline" in Wayland situations, and that was a particularly noticeable increase in latency. Plus, for a while the Nvidia driver also was stuck on software cursors. And even on the DRM path the big two compositors only updated input once every frame, which was the reason for it "to have much worse input lag."

edit: I should also point out the mouse acceleration curve, which if you don't fix it is different between X11 and Wayland compositors. That really messes up the "feel" of things.

PcChip• 9 days ago

I saw a very similar post a month or two ago, is this the same author?

edit: no, this is the one I was remembering: https://farnoy.dev/posts/linux-latency

stusmall• 9 days ago

Great article! Thank you. Also in case others walked away with the same question I had, I'll save you the googling: use the utility vrrtest to help validate if VRR is properly configured on your machine.

esseph4• 9 days ago

From the "Similar Efforts" section toward the bottom:

---

David Ramiro built his m2p-latency and compared X11 vs Wayland in his article Building an Input Latency Meter (Because ‘Wayland Feels Off’ Isn’t a Metric) as well, coming to similar conclusions:

Native Wayland is on par with native X11 (all tied at ~7 ms), while XWayland roughly doubled the latency in his tests.

farnoy did extensive testing with the Open-Source-LDAT in his post Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning, also concluding that XWayland should be avoided.

prhn• 9 days ago

Awesome article.

I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back.

Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions.

I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity.

I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there.

Now the author's got me thinking about gaming-optimized kernels, which I did not realize was a thing.

I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.

marinhero• 9 days ago

I moved to OpenSuse and have the same experience/opinion. The only caveat I had in Wayland is Game Streaming. Sunshine/Moonlight work but the input lag is noticeable and there are artifacts in the game. I go back and forth between X11 and Wayland just because X11 better for game streaming but in time I'm sure I'll go full-time into Wayland.

wing-_-nuts10• 9 days ago

When you say game streaming, is this the steam streaming stack?

_kidlike2• 8 days ago

I've set up sunshine + moonlight on Fedora KDE Wayland, and I've played remotely from a different country with unnoticeable input lag (using a gamepad, playing Cyberpunk). The whole thing is even behind WireGuard.

I have very fast internet on both sides, both fiber to the home, with only the tablet running moonlight being on WiFi.

seanw444• 9 days ago

As far as I'm aware, you get marginal FPS gains switching kernels. It helps some. It's just a matter of whether the effort is worth it to you. The main change is the scheduler: rather than trying to evenly distribute CPU time to processes, it will prioritize bursty processes.

I've been a fan of Hyprland for gaming so far. Much more configurable for things like VRR/tearing and other precise tweaks via Gamescope than when I was on AwesomeWM with X11. Been especially nice having Lua for configuration, which finally feels very familiar with my AwesomeWM roots.

Aurornis4• 9 days ago

With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland.

The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.

jandrese• 9 days ago

The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.

michaelmrose6• 8 days ago

It's very valuable data that everything is so close. It means that most folks can simply ignore it. On the other hand the inferior nature of xwayland well explains the bad rep for wayland latency.

Consider also that people neither run the latest thing nor the fastest software and remember potholes long after they are filled. EG it wasn't that long ago that wine was running on xwayland almost exclusively for instance and the majority of popular titles run via wine.

slackfan2• 8 days ago

I can tell down to about a 3ms difference in lag. Actually even down to 1ms, it's not all its cracked up to be, lemme tell you.

ofalkaed• 8 days ago

I have no idea about gaming but in the music world you start noticing latency when it is above 5ms and the difference between 5 and 8ms is tangible. For the most part anything under 10ms is workable and you will quickly adapt as long as the latency is constant. Under 10ms of latency is a level of latency we are used to dealing with, if you are playing guitar and your amp is 10 feet from you, you have ~9ms of latency. Our brains are pretty good at adapting to these short latencies as long as they are predictable.

The visual latency on gaming could be different but I suspect not, I think it is more an issue that some people fixate on the latency, others just accept and adapt to it. Games do have more possible sources of latency, visual, audio and io, and if these can all be different that can be difficult; years ago I had an issue with this and midi, that one really threw me off. Games may also not model the physics of sound? does sound travel slower than light in games? That could worsen the problem since sound does travel slower in real life and we are used to that, we expect it.

MBCook• 8 days ago

Also the author is testing a game engine.

It’s possible that Gnome/KDE/whatever has wildly different latencies on X11 vs Wayland.

I’d be interested in seeing that test.

But it’s great to know the difference is so small here, which is what I’d expect.

tim-projects2• 8 days ago

I use gamescope on a separate TTY that directly launches either steam or heroic launcher. I find this works exceptionally well. No window manager needed as you are playing a game full screen anyway. It fixed some other things like HDR too but at a loss of the volume and brightness keys no longer working.

Timon3• 8 days ago

That sounds very interesting, do you have any links or references on how you set it up?

seba_dos18• 9 days ago

There's no such thing as "Wayland input latency". It's just a word salad, akin to "HTTP animation smoothness". The post is measuring Xorg vs. KWin (and also XWayland), other implementations of either X11 or Wayland will have different characteristics.

I wonder where the XWayland's added latency comes from though, it seems suspiciously high to just be easily hand-waved as overhead.

markasoftware• 9 days ago

Yep, OP should certainly retest under gnome. Im not in the weeds myself but I get the vibe that gnome's wayland compositor is somewhat faster and more carefully designed than kwin (at least, Emacs in pgtk mode does substantially better under gnome, whereas on Kwin it uses substantial cpu when scrolling and even lags a bit at high resolutions)

umanwizard2• 8 days ago

This is an annoying style of argument from Wayland fans.

Wayland fan: You need to switch to Wayland. X is deprecated and has been for years! Wayland is the future.

User: Okay, I tried, and it's broken/worse.

Wayland fan: No, you don't understand, Wayland is just a protocol. It's your implementation of Wayland that is at fault, not Wayland itself! Wayland is still great!

User: But X was working fine...

seba_dos18• 8 days ago

Is this some kind of Pavlov's dog reaction? That's not what my comment was about, and even if it was it wouldn't make any sense anyway as KWin had good results in these measurements.

somat• 8 days ago

It is a weird argument because X11 is also just a protocol. Sure at this point there is only really one server left in the wild(xorg). But historically there have been more.

And on that topic a question I have, seeing as wayland is "just a protocol" why can't the client application talk to the compositor server over a network socket instead of a unix domain socket? Update: reading the spec I found my answer, Wayland buffers are shared memory surfaces... So really wayland is not "just a protocol"

9029• 8 days ago

Another post suspects Nvidia drivers: https://davidjusto.com/articles/m2p-latency/#results

seba_dos18• 8 days ago

Oh yes, that makes a lot of sense.

hoechst6• 8 days ago

Hi, OP here. I agree with you, "Wayland input latency" is inaccurate and I added a note to the article explaining this.

modeless• 9 days ago

This is awesome. I would like to see tests like this done at 60 Hz as well, and also with non-3D apps. I suspect the results might look different in those conditions. A 500 Hz monitor is not the common case. 2ms is a whole frame!

NelsonMinar2• 9 days ago

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.

mikepurvis• 9 days ago

I think it depends who it is making noise. There are some famous Oculus-era stories about John Carmack tracing display latency issues and then writing lengthy screeds to Samsung engineers to get them to give him lower level access.

I bet if someone like him made enough noise, people at MS would pay attention.

cwillu7• 8 days ago

Sure, but isn't that the point? Needing to be a celebrity to fix something?

torginus3• 9 days ago

This kind of thing is certainly possible under Windows - you can basically patch any kernel API call, replace any COM object instantiation, install filter drivers that intercept any request to and from a device, replace userland DLLs with your own.

It's really scary what you can do, to the point that I often asked myself 'why allow this?' - seeing as hits on certain APIs took me to blackhat forums and articles about writing exploits.

pbhjpbhj2• 9 days ago

Oh sure, but if I just need to troubleshoot why Minecraft-launcher (a first party app) won't launch ... it didn't give any output; it didn't even exist apparently, but only because MS were hiding it, had to crack out Process Explorer just to get something to troubleshoot on ... then it turns out the "turnkey" app from their first-party app store, loading the first-party app, on the same company's OS just failed with no indications to the user at all, not even a "this app crashed". Solution was to cut out as much of MS as possible ... it's just infuriating when it doesn't work, which seems to be all-the-time.

More power to Bazzite and Valve, the sooner games app run in other OS the better.

Hikikomori2• 9 days ago

Not Microsoft but Battlenonsense investigations on latency did get Nvidia to create reflex.

torginus3• 9 days ago

Afaik reflex is a bit different - it times the input to frame latency in your game, and tries to start the gameloop as late as possible in the frame so that your input gets sampled at the latest possible time and the frame still makes it to the vsync period, this isn't really a compositor tech.

smokel• 9 days ago

Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen.

This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions.

There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years.

Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.

inigyou7• 9 days ago

Because if it's open source you can't make money from it or have multiple tiers.

wing-_-nuts10• 9 days ago

give Bazzite a whirl

I never really understood Bazzite's immutable fs thing. Can one install standard dev stuff (i.e. compilers, ides, etc) easily under bazzite?

This use case is the main reason why I lean towards maybe using cachyos

haunter2• 9 days ago

Yes, rpm-ostree solves that

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/rpm...

https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/

abhinavk3• 9 days ago

You can modify the fs using rpm-ostree. It will overlay your changes on top of the immutable image. The recommended way is to create toolbox/distrobox which uses containers to isolate stuff.

NelsonMinar2• 9 days ago

Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer.

So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming.

The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.

Hikikomori2• 9 days ago

It competes with steamos. There are other gaming distros that work like normal distros.

nikodunk• 9 days ago

I use Bazzite for development bc it works like a Mac with sane defaults and a just works approach:

- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.

- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.

data-ottawa• 9 days ago

In addition to the other comment mentioning rpm-ostree, brew is installed on bazzite by default and works about as well as it does on macOS.

You can also use fedora toolboxes to create containers mounted on your home folder, though it is clunky.

omnimus• 8 days ago

The immutable linux is pretty great if you find one that fits you type of dev work. The prebuilt images are powered by a config (so you could build your own) but it's great that you can just follow someones good "config". Switching/updates are suddenly easy.

For example i just need docker for webdev and there is bazzite-dx basically bazzite with docker and few things added. Works pretty great, sometimes when something goes bad i rollback the image and wait for future version.

pelorat• 8 days ago

Yes of course, but you need to do it via the package manager. You can't "sudo make install". If you build your own software and want to install it system wide, you need to flatpack/brew it or run it in a docker container.

(obviously you can modify the filesystem if you really really really want to).

Bazzite is gaming oriented version of Fedora CoreOs. There are many different versions. I am running bluefin.

I've tried a lot of desktop linux distros, and to be honest, immutable linux feels like the future. Anything you do can simply be rolled back. Break something? Just roll it back.

And if you run something like Bazzite, but want to try out Bluefin-Dx which is developer oriented, then you can rebase your existing installation. If you don't like it, just revert back to Bazzite with a single command.

However, it's desktop oriented. Don't run CoreOs on a server.

mmh0000• 8 days ago

The immutable fs thing isn't just Bazzite; it's a fork of Fedora Silverblue[1] (it sounds like AI wrote this, but it didn't! I fear I am becoming the AI...)

Immutable filesystem-based operating systems became fairly widely used as the "base" system for Kubernetes nodes. Because on a container-focused system, you never need to touch the rootfs.

This started as a project called CoreOS[2], which was eventually acquired by Red Hat for its OpenShift (Red Hat Kubernetes) platform.

On servers, immutable rootfs makes a lot of sense. Silverblue (et. al.) was an attempt to see if that concept translated to Desktop systems well. Reviews are mixed. Some people swear it's the best thing since bread. Other people claim it's worse than having dental work done.

I'm personally somewhere in the middle. I think the concept is good, but if you want to do anything to change the core system, like installing custom video drivers, it quickly becomes a pain. I like to equate it to the "n00b"-OS. People who "just want the damn computer to work", immutable is great, because neither they nor an application can do anything to really break the system. On the other hand, it really limits (without complex work-arounds that other systems don't need) what "power users" can do.

In "the perfect immutable OS world", you would never directly install any application; instead, you run everything in a container (i.e., Flatpak). So you have layers of protection: an immutable root and a container-based permission system; the worst* thing an application could do is blow up your home directory. But if you manage permissions correctly, the most damaging thing would be an application blowing up only itself.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...

esseph4• 8 days ago

So how this often works is you leave the distro itself alone per say, and then install user flatpaks. This gives you user level apps with the benefits of the immutable distro.

Outside of that there are commands to install packages directly and some things must be installed that way.

ivanjermakov• 8 days ago

results will get reported back

Even better, most of the tech stack is open source and contributions are welcome!

Someone• 8 days ago

These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft could turn a knob and get telemetry data from millions of devices, and feed that back to the software graphics authors.

Certainly both Intel (https://www.techpowerup.com/312122/psa-intel-graphics-driver...) and Nvidia (https://nateshoffner.com/blog/2017/05/disable-nvidia-telemet...) collect such data themselves (opt-in in both cases, so they may not get much data from the most hard-core gamers)

Aardwolf• 8 days ago

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful.

If only they'd actually DO something with this meaningfulness. I love and use Linux as my daily driver, but desktop environments and everything around it have become so complicated yet worse than before.

In the past a simple config file with intuitive setting names inside of them could make you do anything you wanted.

Today they have all these layers of abstraction for themes, icon sets and light and dark mode and what not, but almost NO combination works!

If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere. And even if not involving light or dark mode, same misery with whatever themes like "Adwaita" and others, some things will work in one, other things in another, I've seen a PDF viewer that made everything black text on black background in some desktop themes... A PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it?

No theme I found anywhere has _well visible_ scrollbars, they all seem to love making them as subtle as possible so you can hardly see where your scroll position actually is. No theme I found anywhere has a _clear visual distinction_ (different color, not just a subtle shade difference) for the selected window vs the non selected ones. This would be _extremely_ handy for knowing in what window you're typing now, even windows 3.11 got this (and the scrollbars, and the ability to customize your colors) better

While not latency, it's still a thing they just can't get right, and when things were less overdesigned it actually worked better, so what was all this for?

doodlesdev• 8 days ago

   > If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere.

I've been using Linux (Linux Mint Cinammon, then Fedora Linux GNOME) for over five years and I've never had that. What kind of desktop environment, themes and applications are you using?

aljgz• 8 days ago

My experience has been reasonably consistent. My main DE is KDE, it switches between light and dark based on my location and time. It switches to warmer colors at night. I have never had a problem in the applications I use. I occasionally switch on the fancy effects like windows fall apart when I'm in the fun mode, or I'm showing something to friends, as a bit of fun makes everything more interesting, and all work perfectly well.

sph• 8 days ago

My bet is that either you’re using a Mickey Mouse distro, or you tweaked your themes/thrashed your config and now you have all those issues that I haven’t seen in a decade since installing custom GTK themes.

LelouBil• 8 days ago

I think this is misguided.

a PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it

It can, it just chose to reuse the theming settings of it's platform (be it QT or GTK, or whatever) instead of forcing them.

The desktop environment is simply setting the defaults for the platform and most applications use them instead of forcing colors and themes and font.

And you can just try many combinations of themes + window managers + whatever app that fits in a desktop environment you want.

Maybe what's exactly to your liking doesn't exist yet, but the beautiful part it that it's a lot easier to make it for Linux than for any other OS because everything is open.

preg_match4• 8 days ago

Desktop environments have improved so many times over IMO. KDE and Gnome are legitimately high-performance and extremely usable - more so than Windows or Mac in my experience.

Yes theming in particular has gotten complex, but that's largely because of the application domain. We now abuse electron for everything. And, if it's any consolation, it's still 100x better than Windows, which can't decide on less than 12 themes for its own built-in applications, let alone third-party apps.

alanwreath2• 8 days ago

Bazzite or CacheyOS (if you wish to do gaming and have more rope to hang yourself mainly because you can more easily affect the system if it isn’t trying to enforce immutability).

TBH with the onslaught of LLM CLI’s like Claude I am a lot more promiscuous in my Linux OS choices as of late. I used to stick to Ubuntu because that was the Linux I knew, but the “interface” has become the same to me because I just ask Claude to help me achieve a semantic goal without having to score the web for the appropriate keys.

Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually swing the other way and give NixOS a try finally.

alanwreath2• 8 days ago

I stand by my comments. Bazzite has benefits being immutable but immutability can cause certain tasks to be more involved or constrained. Case in point it’s nice that Bazzite comes with a lot of sane defaults:

  - brew
  - podman

But it would be disingenuous to understate the additional hurdles either you or software you are accustomed to using being amenable to operating within the immutability restriction. That’s not to discount the great benefits and entire categories of problems that immutability protects you from. It’s just a priority and weighing your options question.

Here’s an example that bit me: I wanted to run k3s/k0s but both have issue with Bazzite. Those were hard stops for me.

preisschild4• 8 days ago

Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it

And thats exactly where free software shines. Enough people fixing issues they deem worthy of spending time on means the overall software will only improve with time.

calvinmorrison2• 9 days ago

X11 is a protocol. Xorg is an end of life'd project run by the Wayland team.

Xlibre is an actively developed and maintained X11 protocol display server.

Xfree86 is dead, long live Xorg. Xorg is dead, long live Xlibre!

anthk• 8 days ago

Xenocara does it better than XLibre.

preisschild4• 8 days ago

You forgot to mention that Xlibre is run by a conspiracy theorist, who broke Xorg by having multiple bugs in his Merge Requests and is well known in the kernel mailing list for spreading vaccine misinformation and getting called out by Linus Torvalds personally for it

https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/CAHk-=wiB6FJknDC5PMfpkg4gZrb...

Would you run and rely on TempleOS? Then XLibre is for you!

calvinmorrison2• 8 days ago

He didn't break Xorg because xorg isn't shipping new releases. All developers introduce bugs.

dreamlayers• 9 days ago

Why isn't Wayland better than X11?

seba_dos18• 8 days ago

Because when it's done right it's not the compositor/display server that's the bottleneck.

preisschild4• 8 days ago

Could just be because of the proprietary nvidia driver or its specific to KDE's wayland compositor. We'd need more data.

hs86• 9 days ago

It looks like consoles and PCs have settled on somewhat different gaming configurations. Consoles usually try to target a fixed output frame rate, while the resolution is often dynamic. On PCs, by contrast, the resolution stays static, while the frame rate and frame-time pacing are dynamic. How does this fit into the latency discussion?

Especially in competitive gaming, I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

Am I out of touch, or is it the children with colored LEDs on their DRAM sticks who are wrong?

Cieric2• 9 days ago

As someone who is in the rendering space for work. Having a higher framerate does help, but in a weird way. Basically the start of the frame rendering is what mostly dictates where objects are rendered. By getting a higher framerate the position of objects that you see in game are much closer to their "real" position. So it's less about seeing more frames at that point and more about seeing the most up to date information possible. Technically it could be possible to render the frame in sync with the framerate and just offset the rendering so it finishes right before it's pushed to the screen, but if you're slightly wrong you'll get really bad stuttering and the execution time of gpus and the cpu submitting the work isn't really deterministic.

colechristensen• 9 days ago

As the frame rate goes up the lag between the game state and display state goes down. It doesn't matter that the "extra" frames aren't displayed, the frame that is being displayed needs to be as up to date as possible.

account426• 8 days ago

Delayed rendering start + VRR is the holy grail. Then small misses don't matter that much.

rcxdude• 9 days ago

Framerates beyond your display's refresh rate are not completely pointless, though a bit wasteful: they do mean that each frame as it is displayed shows a more up-to-date representation of the game state than if your framerate is matched to your refresh rate. In principle you don't need to render the excess frames: ideally your frame time is predictable enough you can kick off the render just before the display refresh, but the penalty is that if you miss the deadline you get some pretty jarring jankiness.

shakow• 9 days ago

I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate

Could this be to reduce input lag?

redox99• 9 days ago

Running above the display refresh rate is only decent when you are wayyyy above it, at least double. If you have a 120hz display and run something variable around 150fps, its much worse. But 500fps does help, you're basically seeing more recent frames as it scans the screen.

Aurornis4• 9 days ago

Many PC games have dynamic resolution, too. The reason consoles target 60fps is because that’s the frame rate you get with most TVs and everyone playing the game has the same hardware (or couple variants).

Especially in competitive gaming, I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

A newly rendered frame can cut-in during scan out. This shows up as tearing artifacts where the frame is changed while being sent to the display, but it allows fresher pixels to hit the screen below that tearing line. So each frame on the monitor can be a mix of multiple rendered frames.

It’s not as good as having variable refresh rate display with high refresh rate, but it does reduce latency.

For less action based games it’s common to turn vsync on and pace the frames to the refresh rate to eliminate this tearing.

0x4574• 9 days ago

Consoles target 30fps though. Very rarely they target 60fps and even less rarely they can reach that.

0x4574• 9 days ago

Especially in competitive gaming, I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

In video games you essentially have one giant loop that runs every frame (today it's more than that, but at its core it's still that). Producing frames faster than the display’s refresh rate can still reduce input latency because the next display refresh is more likely to use a recently generated frame. It does not necessarily mean the game receives more input events, but it can process and reflect those inputs sooner.

Not placebo, but diminishing returns become significant, and the benefit depends on frame queues, VSync, VRR, whether the game is CPU- or GPU-bound, and how its input and simulation loops are designed.

Telaneo4• 9 days ago

I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

If they are chasing a placebo effect, it's a really powerful one, since all the actual competitive people are often willing to sacrifice all detail and quite a lot of resolution to get those stupid high frame rates.

I can see the difference too, but the diminishing returns usually make it not worth it, since I prefer the eye candy better details and higher resolutions give me.

Also, some games can adjust the resolutions on the fly to keep a consistent frame rate. It's only become a feature on modern games, but I believe that's mostly a historical accident. PC games could often run on much worse hardware than they were actually designed for (with minimum requirements often being absolute minimums, and not 'this is what we developed for'), so people played them on low frame rates, so that kind of jank was often more culturally accepted on PC, and if you didn't want that experience, you could always upgrade. While on console, there was no upgrade path, and games were optimised for that one config, and thus never allowed to drop too far into the red (and dropping resolution is often a better option in those cases).

drdexebtjl2• 9 days ago

There’s an argument to be made that dropping all unimportant detail could make professional players react faster even if it doesn’t improve end-to-end latency in the PC.

This is something that could be tested experimentally, but isn’t, because the subjects we would need to test this on are all sponsored by hardware vendors.

Night_Thastus2• 9 days ago

Consoles are more and more supporting VRR, as are televisions.

But yes, given the limitations of the hardware, they often offer two modes - a high framerate but lower quality mode and a high quality but lower framerate mode.

I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

Pixel refresh is only one part of latency. A higher framerate will lower several other parts of the overall latency. Monitors Unboxed has charts that visualize the amount of latency for each step.

lightedman2• 8 days ago

"Especially in competitive gaming, I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect."

Depends on the engine. Anyone remember Quake 3's multiple of 3 frame rate speed hack?

robrtsql• 8 days ago

I have found that input latency is a LOT more acceptable with a controller than it is with a mouse.

Playing a cinematic game with a controller (especially with auto-aim) at 30FPS with vsync is fine. Playing a first person shooter with a mouse, or a game where you control your camera with a mouse, at 30FPS with vsync feels very bad.

That's my theory on why the priorities are different, at least.

kev009• 8 days ago

It's chronoception effect, not placebo effect. Standard literature claims humans can readily visually perceive 60-90Hz, and perhaps somewhere 500-1000Hz for ghosting. Note that all this is somewhat tangential to the article which focuses on _input latency_, I think the author is driving the high refresh just to minimize _output latency_ as much as possible from the test.

bsimpson• 9 days ago

The Rock Band guitars have a photoresistor for precisely this purpose: the screen flashes and the guitar responds when the light hits it. It helps make the otherwise very painful calibration process transparent.

It would be so cool to get that to work in Linux. I know the instrument code is in hid-sony. Here are some open tabs I've got in case anyone's curious:

- https://pascal.giard.info/techreports/nguyen-daniel-autocali...

- https://www.niangames.com/articles/reverse-engineering-rockb...

- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...

Telaneo4• 9 days ago

I have a vague memory of (X?)Wayland being much worse than X11 before, and some patch or protocol making it out to all the relevant implementations, but I might have imagined that, since these result show virtually no difference, and only XWayland shows a marginal difference.

Or maybe it just came out of nowhere and was never true.

haunter2• 9 days ago

SteamOS and Bazzite both use Xwayland through gamescope which is the worst option as it seems https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

Avoid XWayland. It added 3.13 ms of latency, more than all other effects combined.

AlienRobot• 9 days ago

I'm not sure I understand. If X11 software requires a X11 server and you have a Wayland compositor, how do you "avoid" XWayland?

upboundspiral• 9 days ago

gamescope is a custom wayland compositor that Valve built for gaming... In steam big picture mode there is no xwayland or anything, just gamescope.

What you are reading from the readme notes that it calls into xwayland only when gamescope (wayland compositor) is nested within another compositor (say kwin or mutter).

gamescope itself is wayland only, and when run on SteamOS is has no xwayland latency...

seba_dos18• 8 days ago

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Gamescope is essentially a XWayland-only compositor (with some basic xdg-shell support that's disabled by default). All games on SteamOS go through XWayland.

It doesn't yet mean that it suffers from the latency measured in the article, as the problem could very well be in something else, such as how KWin integrates with XWayland or how GPU drivers interact with it (especially that Nvidia drivers have a history of making XWayland suffer).

bionade24• 8 days ago

gamescope absolutely can have Xwayland child panes & this is currently the default on SteamOS running games with Proton, unless PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 is set in the game options.

wao0uuno• 8 days ago

Whole 3.13ms? Man idk shit’s unplayable now.

When rendering 60fps on a 60Hz display every frame takes approximately 16ms to render. Then you have to add TV latency that’a probably around 20ms unless you have a very nice OLED TV. Wireless controller latency is around 8ms I think? Then your imperfect human brain adds even more latency especially when you’re tired after work. That 3ms is not perceivable. Make that 5ms even. Nobody would be able to tell a difference in a blind test.

clodecloud• 9 days ago

Linux is underrated and is only getting better. I am building a linux cloud platform so we can build unity and Godot games with mcps right in your browser. Not only is Linux the only option but I have realized it is the best option for AI

Havoc2• 9 days ago

Using Wayland (hyprland) for daily driver and it's the happiest I've been with an OS in a long time on feel. Feels crisp in that spartan way that windows & macos just don't - no animations, taskbar, popups or god knows what else.

bee_rider• 9 days ago

That’s interesting. Hyprland, spartan? It’s the fancy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink tiling WM, isn’t it?

Havoc2• 8 days ago

Spartan...haha...I mean it's all relative. Certain relative to the other two boxes I use daily - macos & win.

I do know it is favoured by ricers with animations & transparency but I just use it to tile stuff. Think I selected it over sway & i3 due to wayland support at the time. Not sure.

inigyou7• 8 days ago

I guess you'd feel the same in i3 or Xmonad as well.

Aurornis4• 9 days ago

This used a 500Hz display which hides a lot of the problems that would show up on slower displays.

The XWayland result is 3ms slower, which at refresh rates this high makes me wonder if it was one frame behind.

Running the tests at 120Hz or even 60Hz might be more interesting because we could start to separate out very small differences in timing from the much larger effects of being a full frame behind.

boomskats2• 9 days ago

A lot of people conflate Wayland being worse than X11 with Gnome on Wayland being worse than Gnome on X11.

Wayland has been great for me for a few years now. I don't use Gnome or nvidia though.

doubled112• 9 days ago

If I understand the semantics of it all correctly, in that sense, there is no such thing as "Wayland". It is all a little bit confusing compared to the X11 ecosystem.

You don't run GNOME on Wayland. You run GNOME's Wayland compositor, which is an entirely different implementation than Plasma's Wayland compositor.

boomskats2• 9 days ago

That's what I mean though.

I've not used gnome for years, but I have a vague memory of gnome/mutter running on a single main thread which used to lock up quite a lot (javascript etc). And because in X it was X that used to manage things like rendering the mouse pointer every frame, whereas in Wayland it flipped to mutter having to do it directly, the stalls were way more obvious in wayland than X, which is where I think a lot of this perception came from.

Again, not sure how much of this is accurate, but that's the point I was trying to make.

torginus3• 9 days ago

I am not super familiar with Wayland, but basically how composited rendering under X11 works, is if you have a fullscreen window, you can give an 'unredirect' hint to the compositor, in which case when nothing else is drawing your screen, it will stop compositing, and pass your app's swapchain directly to the screen.

This is pretty much optimal, and you can't really do much better than this.

Once a stray window appears on top, or something makes the compositor think it can't do this, it'll do the intermediate step of compositing your app window with others into a temp buffer, and render that.

Sometimes the unredirect breaks for some reason (I remember a case where for some inexplicable reason my app kept creating a window 1px smaller than the screen height), or you use XWayland, you get bad latency.

Since this is a fundamental constraint, other compositors on different OSes must work like this, and you can run into issues like this as well.

Another thing - Wayland afaik started exporing 'display planes' - which are a HW feature of GPUs, that allow it to composite multiple layers together - which means the game can render at full FPS and all the windows on top will be drawn into a different plane and get composited with no ill effects - not sure if this is actually used in production yet.

feverzsj• 9 days ago

Yes, we know wayland is not only slower but also with much less features.

gfxfan• 9 days ago

I wonder though, updated pixels might not have the same latency on the whole screen, and it might even be affected by some updates mechanisms, like panel replay. I.e. it would have been interesting to also measure the screen position as a dimension.

Also, both the input latency (usb controller, and its driver), and screen latency (input latency + processing + update delay) are supposedly also affecting all measurements, but hopefully somewhat consistent or at least filtered out.

xyst• 9 days ago

Very interesting analysis and setup.

I wonder what is considered "unnecessary programs" by the author. Is "apparmor" or sandboxing considered in this? Or just user space applications (browser, discord, …).

I wonder if input latency would be improved if you ran setup as `root`. I wouldn’t do it for security sake, but just curious

hoechst6• 8 days ago

Hi, OP here. I just made sure no other user space application were running. Something that basically can be reasonable expected by a person that cares about game performance to do. For example, no one would stop sshd before their gaming session, but closing a Browser is reasonable imo.

That said, this is a pure gaming PC with a Desktop Linux installed, it's not like there's a lot running on there in the first place: no 5 random docker containers, no AppArmor and nothing in kernel space other than what comes by default with CachyOS.

ElijahLynn• 9 days ago

Wow, love this!! This is what makes HN great!

Benjamin_Dobell• 9 days ago

Been dealing with this a bit at Breaka Club. We teach kids to code with a modded version of Overcooked 2!.

We stream OC2[1] with our mod preinstalled over WebRTC. This ensures that kids/schools don't have to try and install the mod. This is particularly important since we support running on school provided hardware. Installing a game without a mod would be hard enough. Added advantage though is kids play with a virtual (on screen) gamepad on iPads in Mobile Safari.

Game instances run in Docker containers in Kubernetes/k3s atop very outdated nVidia hardware. Given we're already going across the Internet into school networks, we've tried very hard to optimize latency across the board. Using NVidia NVEnc with DMABuf (zero copy) etc. We're unfortunately using XWayland at present so experience the documented input overhead. Although our inputs are virtual devices at this point, so the overhead may be a bit different. Trying to optimize this whole thing end to end has been a challenge. I would say that performance is currently "acceptable".

OC2 coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITWSL5lTLig (not streamed in this case)

[1] We've bought a limited number of copies of OC2 and pods claim a license on startup. If we're at capacity, kids play something else.

eaf7e281• 9 days ago

Really hope to see a Windows result. What if Windows has a latency of 10 ms+. xD

closeneough• 9 days ago

How does Windows compare to this?

teodorlu• 9 days ago

Very interesting!

Latency numbers are written with three significant digits (4.21 ms). I'm curious about the accuracy of the measurement device. If it can measure tens of microseconds, I'm impressed. If it can't, the conclusions in this article should be taken more coarsely.

zaik• 8 days ago

it starts collecting samples from the photodiode (every ~24 µs).

They also have repeated measurements which improves the precision.

ant6n• 8 days ago

For 300 tests, it seems reasonable to report with some more precision on the median.

dosisking• 9 days ago

I wonder how FreeBSD X11 compares to Linux X11

DarkmSparks2• 9 days ago

The main issue is with mouse movement rather than clicks tho...

Night_Thastus2• 9 days ago

Clicks and mouse movement do have different latency, but it doesn't matter for this test. The click is the constant part to show relative positioning of X11/wayland/low latency/vrr/etc. The relative performance should be the same ranking for mouse movement, just with different exact values.

DarkmSparks2• 8 days ago

Different order of magnitude in my experience.

Wayland mouse movement lag is/can be/could/was in the order of several hundred milliseconds.

Its that that people notice, not 3 or 4ms difference in click response.

criddell• 9 days ago

These results are way better than what Dan Luu measured almost a decade ago:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Even if everything else is perfect, display latency on modern panels is 1-3 ms. So all of the input processing and display pipeline can't be taking more than a millisecond or two and that's remarkable.

throwaway2709252• 8 days ago

Well thats also partly because they use a 500hz display in tfa.

An update to Dan Luus articles with modern tech like these high refresh displays, fast gamer keyboards/mice etc would be great thought!

saltcured2• 9 days ago

The input latency that has been driving me crazy lately is the screen unblank latency to allow input to a program.

E.g. I have an old laptop running a browser playing some internet radio stream. Eventually the screen blanker (without locking) activates.

Some real life event makes me want to hit the space bar to pause music. But the modern screen blank has decided that it should eat/ignore key presses while blank. So hitting the key doesn't pause music. I have to wait for the screen to light up before it will be possible to trigger the pause, and this delay feels interminable!

I seem to recall that in the old days the input remained active to the focused window even if the screen was in a power saving state. This power saving was not conflated with screen-lock security etc. I much prefer that. I think this was because DPMS power saving was an underlying X server behavior, not delegated to a screensaver/lock application?

I'd also be partially satisfied with the async behavior of old terminal programs. My inputs should be buffered and processed even if the effects haven't returned to the screen yet. Then I could at least hit keys twice and be trained to know that one would unblank, the other would pause, and all would be well (eventually).

The current behavior is like having a temporarily numb hand, and being frustrated waiting for sensation to return before I can operate anything!

wing-_-nuts10• 8 days ago

Question, does your monitor have a KVM? Cause I definitely notice this behavior, even on windows and os x with my monitor. I believe it was the same way on linux as well but it's been a minute since I used linux on my desktop

saltcured2• 8 days ago

This is actually a laptop with its builtin display.

Edit to add: I don't think it has too much to do with display latency.

It is some convolution of the desktop environment and display server deciding that keyboard input doesn't go to the focused window while it is in this nominal screen blank state. This Fedora 43 on a boring generic Thinkpad.

inigyou7• 9 days ago

This website uses IP address blocking to censor itself, and deserves to be publicly shamed for it. Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/hrYZ6

hoechst6• 8 days ago

Hello, this is my website and I do not know what you mean by this. If you give me technical details (like the subnet your operating out of), I can take a look at it.

My webserver is using crowdsec (https://www.crowdsec.net) to ban malicious IPs and I would guess that you are somehow unintentionally affected by this.

You can also test your IP by entering it into the crowdsec website to see if it is affected.

inigyou7• 8 days ago

There you go then. Thank you for confirming my determination of IP blocking. The archive link above may work for the users you censor.

Paying $1900/month for an IP address blocklist for a website? Yikes.

sellmesoap2• 8 days ago

I appreciate the article, it's cool to see such small differences across all those settings! It says they learned to solder, if you see solder joins that look like those in the first picture, keep learning! Those are some dry joins, which can easily lead to failure, or intermittant signal loss. Soldering can be a touchy sport!

hoechst6• 8 days ago

OP here, thank you for the feedback. I will keep it in mind for the next time I'm soldering something.

sellmesoap2• 8 days ago

The main trick is getting the pad/component hot enough that you're adding solder to them, not to the iron. The end result should look like the solder is a smooth fillet, not jaggy/crystalized bumps. Now to tweak my nixos gaming rig with your settings thanks to your research!

coldblues• 8 days ago

Addressing all the people here talking about latency of under 10ms, I direct you towards these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE-P_7-YiVM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832155

delusional• 8 days ago

Hey, I made one of these too[1]. One of the cool things about my implementation is that the sample loop is carefully written in cycle counted assembly to sample the ADC of the teensy 2.0 at the absolute maximum frequency. I like your blogpost a lot more than mine though.

[1] Github: https://github.com/DelusionalLogic/Frametime, Blogpost: https://www.jnsn.dev/posts/frametime/, and followup: https://www.jnsn.dev/posts/fastisslow/

hoechst6• 8 days ago

That's awesome, odd that I did not come across your project when i was researching this. I'll make sure to read your posts and source code.

abc424• 8 days ago

Huh. I turned on PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 when it became available and didn't notice any change in input lag. Probably one of the many reasons why I'm not a competitive player.

I also don't like to play above 60Hz.

maltelau• 8 days ago

At 60 Hz, there are 16.6 ms between frames, so the ~3 ms improvement from not using XWayland would be very hard to notice visually. Where it can make a difference is that some competitive FPS games have some kind of client side hitscan or lag compensation and often play at high refresh rates, so there it can actually matter that their system reports to the multiplayer server that you clicked in the right place a couple of milliseconds earlier.

abc424• 8 days ago

Oh, cool! Thanks for the knowledge.

account426• 8 days ago

I also don't like to play above 60Hz.

But why?

abc424• 8 days ago

Wrong framing. I would need a reason to go above 60Hz, since it doesn't look any better to me and just wastes energy.

heyyyshiv• 8 days ago

great

somehnguy• 8 days ago

Well written article with a lot of interesting info. I do wish there was a comparison to Windows as well though, as a frame of reference.

url00• 8 days ago

Something interesting is the author right away wants to isolate and reduce placebo. But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not? The ultimate test is how it feels to use on a personal level.

Of course, where gathering this sort of data _is_ useful is diagnosing and fixing real latency so it obviously has merit. I just think it's ok to lean on taste and experience for most things UI/UX, including latency.

Another point, by couching the comparison in a less technical form (for example, rating a configuration/setup out of 5 stars or some similar approach), it protects from being "too methodological" during testing and data-gathering. One possible issue with the author's methods is if there are degenerative cases that are common in the day-to-day experience of a given configuration, they are unlikely to be present during the precise test that they have setup.

httpsterio• 8 days ago

Can't say that I agree. I play rhythm games on a national level and benchmarking and reducing input latency is very important in those games.

The games I play (ITGmania) measure accuracy to the tenth of a millisecond, any fluctuation in your hardware latency can ruin your scores and nothing really is more annoying than an inconsistent setup where the latency change between or during a session is absolute hell.

Vibes and latency don't belong in the same sentence at all imo.

cwillu7• 8 days ago

It's vibes when you don't have the tools to isolate and measure it. It's unfortunate that “vibe” is almost always pejorative these days.

noAnswer• 8 days ago

But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?

Not sure if I can follow but...no?! My first TFT-TV had 2 seconds input lag. Impossible to play video games on it. That has nothing to do with feelings.

Already 10ms delay has a measurable effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qjSGEOEaXo

tverbeure• 8 days ago

But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?

In the case matters most, it's not a placebo.

Imagine 2 FPS players with identical ability who play against each other. If one has a system with 4ms latency and the other has one with 5 ms latency, the former will statistically have the upper hand, even if the players can't, in isolation, notice a difference between the 2 systems.

__mharrison__• 8 days ago

I need to look into this more. I was trying to vibe code an OBS plug-in just last week to measure sync between audio and video.

My system flashed the screen white and played a note. The idea was to have the camera detect monitor brightness and detect the offset from the audio note. I'm practice the brightness of a 40 inch TV didn't seem to impact the video of the insta 360 link webcam.

(I ended up vibe coding a Python GUI to quickly allow me to push through video frames and show the audio frequency. I could quickly type 'v' (video) where I clapped and 'a' (audio) where the waveform changed. It would then tell me the offset...

YmiYugy• 8 days ago

Seeing a comparison of different Wayland compositors could be very interesting.

tokyovigilante• 8 days ago

This is great but it would be even better if 60Hz results were also presented.

casey2• 8 days ago

The article stops halfway through. For developers to do serious work fixing the flaws of wayland they need to know what is causing those hiccups that some users are getting. Not just run wayland on a 500hz monitor and say #NOT_A_PROBLEM #WONTFIX

kelvinjps10• 8 days ago

Aren't most games in XWayland? so it means that basically most games run way slower in Wayland.

snarfy• 8 days ago

A friend commented that since the sensor is not center vertically on the monitor, VRR will win by default.

3abiton• 8 days ago

This was a very enjoyable read, and loved the distribution inclusion, rather than point statistics. I hope there are more tests on different factors like GPUs (nvidia vs amd vs intel), screens, mice, and ultimately windows to see if there is really a difference. I don't play competitve gaming, but careful data driven approach would put a lot of the debated questions to rest.

eqvinox• 8 days ago

So, does X11 have lower latency than Wayland?
Yes, but nowhere near enough to explain why Wayland is generally perceived as much worse than X11.

Personally speaking: Wayland has massive stutters when the system is under load, most notably on the mouse pointer. X11 doesn't.

cl3misch2• 8 days ago

This hits a very soft spot for me. My beloved Spelunky 2 has huge input lag "on Linux", which makes it unplayable for me. It's pretty much the reason I keep my Windows 10 install around. I could not come up with a configuration on Linux that avoids the lag.

It's extra infuriating that online sources report the game running flawlessly but seem to ignore input lag.

cl3misch2• 4 days ago

Inspired by my own comment I looked into it again and came up with this combination in the game's "launch options", which feels much better:

    DXVK_CONFIG="dxgi.syncInterval = 0; dxgi.maxFrameLatency = 1; dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60" gamescope -f --immediate-flips -- %command%

I didn't know about `DXVK_CONFIG` before. It's the DirectX-Vulkan translation layer with its own framebuffer and latency.

I also manually disabled vsync in the game's `local.cfg` XML file.

I love where "gaming on Linux" is going. But I have the feeling the hype on Youtube etc. is in part created by content creators, and doesn't faithfully represent the actual situation (surprise!).

billev2k• 8 days ago

Contrast is your friend. Or at least mine.

throwaway2709252• 8 days ago

Open the menu and click the paint bucket. It seems to cycle through color themes :)

tsoukase• 8 days ago

With so low differences one should always use VRR and not bother about the rest config. Sub-ms differences are impossible to detect.

MobiusHorizons• 8 days ago

Interesting analysis! It would be very interesting to see how this compares to windows on the same hardware.

cyh555• 7 days ago

Is screen tearing enabled for Wayland? Also how's the latency on Linux vs Windows vs MacOS?

Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

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