KDE Wayland for Gaming

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.

It works pretty well. There's some issues with mouse focus capture on multiple monitors in Wayland (both KDE and GNOME), but using gamescope fixes them. I've been PC gaming exclusively on KDE/Gnome Wayland for the past couple of years and haven't had any issues besides the weird mouse focus stuff.

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.

I really struggled with it. I couldn't game in 4K because of Wayland's scaling. It was either actually use my gaming monitor for its intended purpose or have the rest of my GUI be too small to use. (The lack of FreeSync Pro support was also a major downer, so to get the most out of my monitor, I have to use Windows.)

This was about a month ago, so I am not fully up-to-date.

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.

@av_conk 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.

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.

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!