One step closer to full Wayland support.
It would be cool if Valve released a native Steam wayland by the time this hit proton.
Can someone explain what this means? I’m new to Linux gaming. Don’t really get what the difference is between wayland and x11. Will this improve performance in d4 on distros like fedora?
Simply put, X11 is the bottom of the graphics stack, i.e. everything that makes Linux have more than just a command line has historically been built on top of X11
X11 is OLD. Like really old. And has a bunch of problem because of it (no variable refresh rate, no good multi monitor support, no proper fractional scaling , tearing, no security etc) It’s also very mature. Somehow developers have managed to build a decent user experience out of the old X11
The Wayland protocol was designed to overcome the shortcomings of X11 and replace it. Wayland is now at the cusp of being a fully functional complete replacement for X11. It already is for many (most?) use cases.
Many Applications that are not made for Wayland will still run in Wayland, but they run in a fake X11 server inside called Xwayland. But native Wayland is better (performance, security, features)
Wayland very good on AMD and Intel these days. Nvidia was unsupported, but last year nVidia made a business decision to support EGL(?) so with fresh drives work has begun in Gnome and KDE to support Nvidia in Wayland. I’m not sure how mature Nvidia on Wayland is yet
Wayland very good on AMD and Intel these days. Nvidia was unsupported, but last year nVidia made a business decision to support EGL(?) so with fresh drives work has begun in Gnome and KDE to support Nvidia in Wayland. I’m not sure how mature Nvidia on Wayland is yet
Clarification: GBM is what Intel, AMD and the general “nice players” of the Linux graphics ecosystem decided, whereas EGLStreams was something NVidia came up with because it worked better with their proprietary drivers (AFAIK)
Gnome and KDE were fine going out of their way to support both, but smaller implementations such as wlroots (the thing behind sway and Hyprland and other non-Weston “window managers”) didn’t feel the tradeoff was worth it (in both philosophical and manpower reasons) and stuck to GBM.
NVidia comparatively recently “caved in” and got GBM support working (alongside kernel mode setting, PRIME & other terms you don’t really need to know about), and being one of the few proprietary players in the ecosystem they have not been able to benefit from help from the community, which is one of the reasons why their Wayland support is immature compared to the likes of Intel and AMD.
You’re mostly there, but the big issue now is their handling of Xwayland. nVidia also doesn’t expose VRR/GSync under Wayland (but an engineer remarked that it’s slated for the 545 series release on the nVidia Linux forums).
The most glaring issue currently that effectively blocks Wayland for nVidia users is the lack of implicit sync on their end, and the Xwayland developers refusal to merge nVidia’s proposed explicit sync method. This is oversimplifying but the short version is from nVidia “implicit sync is too slow, it architecturally conflicts with our driver forcing a comprehensive rewrite, and we don’t want to look bad with implicit sync’s performance”. The response from X devs boils down to “You weren’t there when we planned all this, implicit sync works fine, explicit sync won’t benefit how the Mesa drivers work so this would only be for your benefit, and you’ve been complete assholes”.
Neither side looks like it’s going to flinch, so getting Wine to run in Wayland is the only feasible solution for nVidia users. In an all-wayland environment with no applications running under Xwayland, Mutter and plasma-wayland run like a dream, it’s a great experience.
