| Headlines |
| 2025-07-09 |
Wayland and X11 benchmarked across multiple GPUs and distributions |
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Proponents of Wayland have been promoting the display protocol for over a decade, reporting how the replacement for X.Org will provide cleaner code, lighter display software, and a more efficient design. While Wayland has made great gains in recent years, performance and efficiency continue to be problems for the younger display protocol. Dedoimedo has published a series of benchmarks in which Plasma on Wayland vs Plasma on X11 performance, power consumption and efficiency are tested. The series of articles covers running Plasma on multiple distributions (including KDE neon and Fedora) and multiple video cards (AMD and NVIDIA), using X11 with and without compositing enabled. The final article then compares GNOME running on Wayland against Plasma (both Wayland and X11 sessions) and shares the results. "The results are quite interesting. By and large, GNOME Wayland, as implemented in Fedora, seems slightly less performant than Plasma's Wayland, which in turn, is less performant than X11, and as we've seen that, too, is still worse than X11 with compositing off. Significant numbers that, to me, tell one things: it's too early to deprecate the old framework, because the new one still hasn't caught up. No emotion, no fanboyism, simple pragmatic c'est la vie.
If we look just at Wayland, on idle, GNOME performed worse in battery use and CPU data, with surprisingly good GPU numbers that do not align with any other test. Under load, again, GNOME's Wayland used most resources, and had the worst FPS count by far. Furthermore, Fedora's kernel seems to be doing a lot more work, but also doing it quite efficiently. Lastly, both Plasma's System Monitor and GNOME's System Monitor seem to be badly optimized tools, given what we've seen so far.
To sum it up, X11 is still the most optimal choice, performance wise, to say nothing of the compositing off option, which blows the rest out of the water. Plasma's Wayland implementation is better than GNOME's, it seems."
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