AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance At Parity Between KDE Plasma 6.0 X11 vs. Wayland

With a few weeks having passed since the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release along with some point releases for addressing initial fall-out, I've been meaning to run some Plasma 6.0 Linux gaming performance benchmarks. I'll have up some interesting metrics soon using Fedora 40 while for this initial article is a look at the KDE Plasma 6.0 gaming performance between the Wayland and X11 sessions atop KDE Neon. Then similarly are the results for GNOME Shell with its X11 and Wayland sessions.

Using the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based KDE Neon I ran some benchmarks looking at the open-source Radeon Linux gaming performance atop this distribution that is already shipping the latest KDE Plasma 6.0 / KDE Frameworks 6 / KDE App packages. From there I ran a variety of gaming benchmarks using the kdefault KDE Plasma 6.0 Wayland session for the (X)Wayland gaming performance and repeating the tests as well under the alternative X11 session.

For getting some GNOME reference figures I repeated the same tests using GNOME Shell X11 / Wayland atop the same KDE Neon package set. It's worth noting though in the KDE Neon archive from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the GNOME Shell 42.9 packages compared to the very latest GNOME 46 upstream release. Thus for the upcoming Fedora 40 comparison it will be more interesting for looking at the Linux gaming performance when maintaining the very latest packages for each.

The same AMD Ryzen 9 7950X system with AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics on Linux 6.5 + Mesa 23.2 was used for this KDE Plasma 6.0 focused gaming benchmarks.