What’s the current landscape like for gaming with KDE Wayland? I’ve heard that recently VSync can be disabled and that Wine has better support for Wayland nowadays.
Whats your experience like with this setup?
If you’re playing competitive FPS games then Wayland still isn’t there, use X11 instead. Outside of it, I’d say it’s worth a shot, it goes especially well with FreeSync monitors.
Your experience will vary from your GPU vendor too. I have an AMD card so Wayland is a smooth experience for me, if you’re on Nvidia then you will most likely face issues.
I’ve noticed a bug where in GPU bound scenarios entire desktop is lagging. This issue happens for me on Wayland but not X11. I don’t know what’s causing it, could be my graphics card running out of its 4 GB of VRAM.
TL;DR give it a try, you can easily switch between X11 and Wayland.
I would say the exact opposite if you’re playing competitive FPS. Xorg tears and is super jittery like a motherfucker. Wayland is the only thing that properly drives my 240hz monitor.
Generally tearing in competitive titles doesn’t matter, but latency does. And right now, x11 still wins on that front. Wayland feels terrible in the competitive shooters I play.
Weird, everything is fine on my end, however my screen is a bit slower, at 144 Hz. For games which run below my refresh rate I use Wayland + VRR, but for games which run well above it I use X11 and disabled compositing.
Some examples on Wayland: Hunt: Showdown, Battlefield 4, Grounded, Genshin. On X11: CS:GO, Minecraft, Ultrakill
Wayland with VRR should give you very comparable latency to X11, but if you have a monitor without support for it then X11 is definitely better.
Do you know what happens when games run above your refresh rate? Is VRR still engaged there or does it fall back to Wayland’s FIFO Vsync?
Afaik, it will fall back to FIFO. Fortunately, if you’re using a high refresh rate monitor, by the time you reach this point, FIFO will be adding a very small amount of latency. I generally choose to limit my games to my refresh rate when making use of VRR, as it leads to a good combination of low and consistent latency, rather than the spikes you will face when playing with it unlocked.
It works pretty well. There’s some issues with mouse focus capture on multiple monitors in Wayland (both KDE and GNOME), but using
gamescopefixes them. I’ve been PC gaming exclusively on KDE/Gnome Wayland for the past couple of years and haven’t had any issues besides the weird mouse focus stuff.I really struggled with it. I couldn’t game in 4K because of Wayland’s scaling. It was either actually use my gaming monitor for its intended purpose or have the rest of my GUI be too small to use. (The lack of FreeSync Pro support was also a major downer, so to get the most out of my monitor, I have to use Windows.)
This was about a month ago, so I am not fully up-to-date.
In System Settings under Display Configuration, set “Legacy Applications (X11): Apply scaling themselves”. That should allow you to actually use 4k resolution in games.
@av_conk As far as I can tell from trying it myself, and from watching people struggle with it, wayland is in no way yet ready for the gaming scene. For some things it’s somewhat usable but overall, I advise anyone with questions to stick with X for now.
Wayland gaming is great, especially on KDE, you can go into display settings/compositor and switch fro smoother animation to lower latency for a latency that’s even lower than X11, without any of the X11 issues.
I’ve been using it for a long time now, gaming hasn’t really been an issue at all. It’s mostly graphical artifacts with some applications/the compositor at this point when using non-integer scaling and potentially also related to my multi-monitor configuration, such as lines that shouldn’t be on screen, pixel scaling artifacts, and plasmashell rendering the desktop for the wrong monitor scale after the screen locks and turns off, but there’s been nothing that completely breaks it anymore for a while now.
I’ve heard that recently VSync can be disabled
You can set an option for the compositor (“Reduce latency by allowing screen tearing artifacts in fullscreen windows”), however as far as I know, standard wine including staging has no real Wayland support right now. Everything up to this point is just laying the groundwork and there’s no switch or anything to enable the functionality AFAIK. The merge request that enables tearing for xwayland was just merged last week.
I play exclusively on kde wayland and I am really happy with it, I don’t have to mess with anything and everything works. The only thing that comes to mind is that Steam isn’t wayland native so you have to set an environment variable to set scaling on hidpi screens. Other than that everything works really fine!
How do you set that environment variable for Steam?
I set STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=2.0 in /etc/environment
Is that within a Steam configuration file?
No, it’s a file in your computer, located at /etc/environment, you need to edit it and add the env variable I posted earlier
Great, thanks! I’ll give it a try
You’re welcome!
Exclusively KDE Wayland gamer here.
The game I play all day long, Deep Rock Galactic, Sekiro, Dark Souls and Elden Ring are working great. I also played ToTK with Yuzu on stable 60fps.
Mods are working great, and honestly I don’t see the difference between X11 and Wayland in gaming performance. As long as it is in Steam, all I need to do is buy the game, install and play. There’s no setting I ever have to mess with.
