alt Hacker NewsWith the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland.
The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.
Replies
I can tell down to about a 3ms difference in lag. Actually even down to 1ms, it's not all its cracked up to be, lemme tell you.
It's very valuable data that everything is so close. It means that most folks can simply ignore it. On the other hand the inferior nature of xwayland well explains the bad rep for wayland latency.
Consider also that people neither run the latest thing nor the fastest software and remember potholes long after they are filled. EG it wasn't that long ago that wine was running on xwayland almost exclusively for instance and the majority of popular titles run via wine.
The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.