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KDE Wayland for Gaming

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?

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in reply to av_conk

Laser
Laser
• •
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.


xwayland: Implement wp_tearing_control_v1 (!665) · Merge requests · xorg / xserver · GitLab

See wayland/wayland-protocols!65 Depends on
GitLab
in reply to av_conk

eshep
eshep
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As far as I can tell from trying it myself, and from watching people struggle with it, wayland is in no way yet ready for the gaming scene. For some things it's somewhat usable but overall, I advise anyone with questions to stick with X for now.

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in reply to av_conk

ElectroLisa
ElectroLisa
• •

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.

in reply to av_conk

2xsaiko
2xsaiko
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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.
in reply to av_conk

anyone_yun
anyone_yun
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I play exclusively on kde wayland and I am really happy with it, I don’t have to mess with anything and everything works. The only thing that comes to mind is that Steam isn’t wayland native so you have to set an environment variable to set scaling on hidpi screens. Other than that everything works really fine!
in reply to anyone_yun

SecurityPro
SecurityPro
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How do you set that environment variable for Steam?

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in reply to SecurityPro

anyone_yun
anyone_yun
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I set STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=2.0 in /etc/environment
in reply to SecurityPro

anyone_yun
anyone_yun
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No, it's a file in your computer, located at /etc/environment, you need to edit it and add the env variable I posted earlier
in reply to av_conk

Presi300
Presi300
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Wayland gaming is great, especially on KDE, you can go into display settings/compositor and switch fro smoother animation to lower latency for a latency that's even lower than X11, without any of the X11 issues.
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