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

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 8 April 2024 at 10:41 AM EDT. Page 2 of 4. 344 Comments.

3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: Wayland was the fastest.

With the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme graphics benchmark both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma 6 were delivering the same performance and no performance imbalance as a result of using the Wayland session.

Counter-Strike 2 benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080. GNOME Shell 42.9: Wayland was the fastest.

With Counter-Strike 2 when running at 1080p the performance was roughly the same between the desktops and compositor type.

Counter-Strike 2 benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: Wayland was the fastest.

But when running Counter-Strike 2 at 4K for the full native resolution, the GNOME Wayland session saw a significant drop in performance compared to KDE Plasma 6.0 or the GNOME X11 session. It's important to note though this is an older version of GNOME Shell found on the KDE Neon distribution and will be interesting to re-visit with GNOME 46.

GravityMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Renderer: OpenGL. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: X11 was the fastest.

GravityMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Renderer: OpenGL. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: Wayland was the fastest.

With the GravityMark OpenGL benchmark, both desktops performed the same and no differences in the Wayland vs. X11 desktop sessions.

GravityMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Renderer: Vulkan. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: X11 was the fastest.

GravityMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Renderer: Vulkan. KDE Plasma 6.0.3: Wayland was the fastest.

But when using the Vulkan renderer of GravityMark, the GNOME Wayland session performed much worse than the GNOME X11 session. Meanwhile KDE Plasma 6.0 was performing the same for this benchmark irregardless of X11/Wayland. Though keep in mind again that the GNOME desktop packages in KDE Neon are the aging GNOME Shell 42 rather than the very latest GNOME Shell 46 upstream so this performance limitation may already be resolved.

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