What’s the current landscape like for gaming with KDE Wayland? I’ve heard that recently VSync can be disabled and that Wine has better support for Wayland nowadays.
Whats your experience like with this setup?
If you’re playing competitive FPS games then Wayland still isn’t there, use X11 instead. Outside of it, I’d say it’s worth a shot, it goes especially well with FreeSync monitors.
Your experience will vary from your GPU vendor too. I have an AMD card so Wayland is a smooth experience for me, if you’re on Nvidia then you will most likely face issues.
I’ve noticed a bug where in GPU bound scenarios entire desktop is lagging. This issue happens for me on Wayland but not X11. I don’t know what’s causing it, could be my graphics card running out of its 4 GB of VRAM.
TL;DR give it a try, you can easily switch between X11 and Wayland.
I would say the exact opposite if you’re playing competitive FPS. Xorg tears and is super jittery like a motherfucker. Wayland is the only thing that properly drives my 240hz monitor.
It works pretty well. There’s some issues with mouse focus capture on multiple monitors in Wayland (both KDE and GNOME), but using gamescope fixes them. I’ve been PC gaming exclusively on KDE/Gnome Wayland for the past couple of years and haven’t had any issues besides the weird mouse focus stuff.
I really struggled with it. I couldn’t game in 4K because of Wayland’s scaling. It was either actually use my gaming monitor for its intended purpose or have the rest of my GUI be too small to use. (The lack of FreeSync Pro support was also a major downer, so to get the most out of my monitor, I have to use Windows.)
This was about a month ago, so I am not fully up-to-date.
I’ve heard that recently VSync can be disabled
You can set an option for the compositor (“Reduce latency by allowing screen tearing artifacts in fullscreen windows”), however as far as I know, standard wine including staging has no real Wayland support right now. Everything up to this point is just laying the groundwork and there’s no switch or anything to enable the functionality AFAIK. The merge request that enables tearing for xwayland was just merged last week.
I’ve been using it for a long time now, gaming hasn’t really been an issue at all. It’s mostly graphical artifacts with some applications/the compositor at this point when using non-integer scaling and potentially also related to my multi-monitor configuration, such as lines that shouldn’t be on screen, pixel scaling artifacts, and plasmashell rendering the desktop for the wrong monitor scale after the screen locks and turns off, but there’s been nothing that completely breaks it anymore for a while now.
