As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.

There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?

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cobar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've had better luck since the switch to Wayland. I don't play many FPS games but mouse input & overall smoothness for strategy games has been great. Check your mouse settings, you might need to set a higher USB sample rate. Piper is a frontend for adjusting them.

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hparadiz 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You should only ever be using Wayland from now on.

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eertami 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know what you mean, though I have a device running SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles where it can achieve the same framerate).

I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.

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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing?

Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.

Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.

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simoncion 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11... Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.

Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK- WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games... everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said that, I do know that -when using KDE- some fullscreen games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up and remain that way until the notification disappears. I expect that that performance problem would go away if I was using the compositor... but I don't want to spend the VRAM on it.

I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]

[0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not match what I've been seeing for years... so some percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really, really can must be coming from distros that ship either dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg installs.

	▲	hparadiz 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		X11 has basically no development anymore. That means regressions are entirely ignored. I switched my Gentoo box from X11 to Wayland three years ago at this point. It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in 2026 except with very old hardware.

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simoncion 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.

Out of curiosity, what games are those? I wonder if I also play a subset of them.