NAME

display - Input latency comparison

DESCRIPTION

Wayland is the future. It brings modern features, better security, and fixes a ton of legacy X11 issues. But when it comes to pure gaming performance, especially minimizing input and presentation latency, X11 as of 2025 is still faster.

X11 delivers consistently lower latency than Wayland.

NOTES

Two in-depth benchmarks - one from mort.coffee (2025-01-26) and another from zamundaaa.github.io (2021-12-14) - have explored this topic in detail. Both are well worth reading for anyone interested in input latency on Wayland versus X11. For convenience, a summary is provided below.

Mort's Latency Discussion: Wayland about +6.5ms Lag

Findings:

• Wayland (GNOME): 23.2 ms
• X11 (GNOME): 16.7 ms

X11 is ~6.5 ms faster - roughly one full frame at 144Hz.

Zamundaaa's Latency Report: X11's Immediate Modes Beat Wayland's FIFO

Findings:

• X11 (with uncomposited or "immediate" presentation) is fastest.
• Wayland compositors add buffering - especially when VSync and compositing are enabled.
• Worst-case (99th percentile) latency was also better under X11.

"Wayland is catching up," zamundaaa notes, but "X11 is still the better choice for absolute lowest latency."

TLDR: Current data suggests that X11 still offers lower input latency compared to Wayland in many scenarios. Additionally, disabling your compositor can help reduce latency further. For now (as of 2025), sticking with X11 may be the better option if minimizing input delay is your priority.

SEE ALSO

gpu(1), kernel(1), mouse-accel(1)