Arch Linux

VarU

Member

Registered: 2025-05-04

Posts: 11

Poor performance on KDE Wayland, decent on KDE X11

Hi All,

Recently, I have tried switching over to Wayland because of the X11 support drop for KDE. However, I find that my performance in a few games suffers greatly. Specifically, I have noticed that for CS2 and The Finals, the displayed frame times and framerates are similar on both X11 and Wayland; however, just visually, I can tell that this is not the case. In Wayland, it looks visually closer to 40-50 fps, with horrible inconsistencies and drops/stutters.

In the case of CS2, I was able to fix this issue by editing  cs2.sh and putting in the line that changes the SDL driver to wayland. I tried the same fix with "SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland %command%" in the launch options, but this does not work.

I am running a laptop with an intel i7-11800H, NVIDIA 3060 laptop GPU, with the nvidia-open drivers and optimus-manager set to NVIDIA only. If any additional information is needed, let me know.

All help is appreciated, thank you.

VarU

Member

Registered: 2025-05-04

Posts: 11

Re: Poor performance on KDE Wayland, decent on KDE X11

I forgot to mention, it works flawlessly on the internal laptop monitor, both windowed and fullscreen. The moment any part of the window/game touches my external monitor, its immediately back to 40 fps.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,064

Re: Poor performance on KDE Wayland, decent on KDE X11

Proton games will rather react to PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 and I'm not entirely sure whether that's already supported in proton 10, but it would definitely be in proton-ge

VarU

Member

Registered: 2025-05-04

Posts: 11

Re: Poor performance on KDE Wayland, decent on KDE X11

Yep, that worked for steam games. Thanks for your help!

Next step is to figure out a solution for non-steam games like osu...