It's important to note that currently there are basically no games designed for Wayland (there might be a few simple ones, but they are hard to find). Almost everything you start runs on XWayland, which is different. In some way it can be seen as Wine for Windows programs. As far as I know, in recent years there were a lot of optimizations done to XWayland and it should only have marginal differences compared to native X.

Last edited by tuxintuxedo on 28 July 2020 at 8:26 pm UTC

I'm waiting for Wayland support in KDE to get in shape before switching. It still has nasty bugs. But games tend to work OK. Especially with XWayland fallback for cases like Wine.

Quoting: tuxintuxedoIt's important to note that currently there are basically no games designed for Wayland (there might be a few simple ones, but they are hard to find). Almost everything you start runs on XWayland, which is different. In some way it can be seen as Wine for Windows programs. As far as I know, in recent years there were a lot of optimizations done to XWayland and it should only have marginal differences compared to native X.

Yeah, i know about that, and that's almost the main reason for creating that topic, i've seen some people arguing that Xwayland create some issues, i haven't seen one, but....who knows, maybe someone else did

Quoting: tuxintuxedoIt's important to note that currently there are basically no games designed for Wayland

Normal games shouldn't be touching anything related to X directly. They use SDL and the like to handle desktop integration. So it should work with Wayland already. Only some ancient games use X and Wine too so far, since Wine didn't implement Wayland support yet.

Last edited by Shmerl on 2 August 2020 at 2:06 am UTC

I use Fedora with Wayland and generally have no problem with games. An old game using ClanLib 0.6 had problems but all commercial games where my computer is powerful enough have run fine.

Quoting: ShmerlOnly some ancient games use X and Wine too so far, since Wine didn't implement Wayland support yet.

Some time ago I found wine-wayland (link to github ).
I did not test it yet, but it looks promising.

@Dennis_Payne: Can you give some details?
-I assume the games don't use XWayland?
-What Games and do they need special modifications/preparations?

Last edited by dr_jekyll on 5 August 2020 at 12:28 pm UTC

I've played games on Wayland for probably two years now either on GNOME or Sway. The only issue I could trace back to Wayland is that a bug in XWayland causes some GLX capabilities to be misrepresented to games relying on GLX, which means that a GLX-based game trying to use MSAA will crash. Luckily these games are relatively few (Paradox games like HOI4 and Stellaris come to mind, along with OpenMW) and you can disable MSAA for them to get them working. A fix for this apparently exists but maybe it hasn't trickled down to Xorg yet. So, usually if I run into a game that doesn't start I just figure out how to disable anti-aliasing and usually stuff just works.

In general benchmarking seems to show only minor performance differences between X11, Xwayland and Wayland, which makes sense since windowing system overhead is comparatively minimal to graphics or CPU processing bottlenecks. A more interesting thing to compare would be frame latency (time it takes between a frame being drawn and being presented on display), since buffer management and compositing differs between X11 and Wayland. I haven't seen such benchmarks being made though.

In regular day to day use, Wayland has been perfectly fine for gaming as far as my gaming needs are concerned, and I tend to try a fair number of different games on a weekly basis. If performance differences exist, they aren't severe enough to harm my enjoyment of the games I play.

Quoting: dr_jekyll

Quoting: ShmerlOnly some ancient games use X and Wine too so far, since Wine didn't implement Wayland support yet.

Some time ago I found wine-wayland (link to github.
I did not test it yet, but it looks promising.

@Dennis_Payne: Can you give some details?
-I assume the games don't use XWayland?
-What Games and do they need special modifications/preparations?

Are you asking me or Shmerl? Most games are probably using XWayland. I don't check. Whether it is native Wayland or using XWayland is irrelevant to me.

Commercial games have worked without problem except for a few using proton. Lara Craft and the Temple of Osiris was just too slow on my hardware. Lego Ninjago Movie and .hack//G.U. Last Recode had drawing issues. I'm using integrated Intel graphics so they might have been too slow even if they worked.

For open source games, I tend to try everything. Older libraries can be problematic. ClanLib 0.6 doesn't get keyboard input when full screen but you have a hard time finding games using it. (I wanted Mojotron because I'm a big Robotron: 2084 fan.) If the game is in interesting enough and not maintained, the special modifications/preparations tend to be me taking over maintenance and porting it to a newer library. Hence my Free Software Game Restoration talk for Libre Planet.

Quoting: Dennis_PayneWhether it is native Wayland or using XWayland is irrelevant to me.

Well for me as a user of the Nvidia official driver it is very relevant (because afaik NVIDIA for now does not support graphics acceleration for XWayland), but I guess I simply have to try things myself.

Anyway thx for the information .

The only game I've run into where I must switch to an X session is Star Conflict. Of course, that was running my own build so it's entirely possible that I just screwed some part of the build process and the official game distributed by storefronts might not have the issue.