It depends on the game/application and what you are running and your distro may have enabled TearFree for you. I use Debian and it isn't enabled by default.

If I was to play Dark Souls 3 and/or Elden ring on Linux without tearfree. There is significant screen tearing and the game feels very choppy when playing.

To enable TearFree on Xorg. You typically make a new configuration file that sits in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and append to the X configuration

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU#Tear_free_rendering

There are downside to this, but I would only imagine they are problems on older GPUs.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/518362/whats-the-do...

I've never noticed these downsides personally and everything seems to work great.

I don't like Wayland. It still seems very buggy and I am running Debian Trixie and would prefer to keep using X11.

But IME Wayland does have higher performance on older hardware it seems than X. My old laptop could barely play Youtube with X11 (it is the video itself not YouTube being a resource hog, I checked), Wayland performance is much better.