With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland.

The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.

▲

ofalkaed 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I have no idea about gaming but in the music world you start noticing latency when it is above 5ms and the difference between 5 and 8ms is tangible. For the most part anything under 10ms is workable and you will quickly adapt as long as the latency is constant. Under 10ms of latency is a level of latency we are used to dealing with, if you are playing guitar and your amp is 10 feet from you, you have ~9ms of latency. Our brains are pretty good at adapting to these short latencies as long as they are predictable.

The visual latency on gaming could be different but I suspect not, I think it is more an issue that some people fixate on the latency, others just accept and adapt to it. Games do have more possible sources of latency, visual, audio and io, and if these can all be different that can be difficult; years ago I had an issue with this and midi, that one really threw me off. Games may also not model the physics of sound? does sound travel slower than light in games? That could worsen the problem since sound does travel slower in real life and we are used to that, we expect it.

▲

jandrese 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.

▲

horsawlarway 2 hours ago | parent [-]

ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation.

And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other.

---

Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.

	▲	DefineOutside 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can genuinely feel just a few milliseconds of input latency with a mouse, it disconnects looking around with your physical actions. It's the same way you can feel the difference between low and high refresh rate monitors, even though you can't really count the frames themselves
	▲	JMKH42 44 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It doesn't matter. Whether you have a ping of 40 or a ping of 300, 3ms is 3ms and will mean you win a little less often. The saying we have in bike racing marginal gains is "leave no stone unturned, but turn over the big ones first" So sure, first make sure your internet connection is solid. Then make sure your hardware and game settings are optimizing FPS to a reasonable point of diminishing returns. Then make sure you don't use XWayland

▲

michaelmrose 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's very valuable data that everything is so close. It means that most folks can simply ignore it. On the other hand the inferior nature of xwayland well explains the bad rep for wayland latency.

Consider also that people neither run the latest thing nor the fastest software and remember potholes long after they are filled. EG it wasn't that long ago that wine was running on xwayland almost exclusively for instance and the majority of popular titles run via wine.

▲

slackfan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I can tell down to about a 3ms difference in lag. Actually even down to 1ms, it's not all its cracked up to be, lemme tell you.