• Date and Git Link: On 2025-01-26, the Git link is https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md.
• Read Blog Post: Yesterday, read [Wayland Cursor Lag: Just give me a break already...] where a Linux user discussed frustration with Wayland input latency but failed to provide hard evidence.
• Personal Opinion: The author shares the author's subjective impression that there's more cursor lag under Wayland than X11. Their experiment was limited by phone camera's 90 FPS.
• Experiment Design: Pointed phone camera at screen and desk, recorded flicking mouse 16 times under Wayland and X11 sessions, converted to JPEGs and counted frames from mouse to cursor movement.
• Hardware Details: Fedora Workstation 41, GNOME 47, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD Radeon RX 7900XT, Gigabyte M32U monitor, Logitech G502 Lightspeed mouse, iPhone 15 Pro with 240 FPS slo-mo.
• Limitations: 240 FPS is not much, pixels don't switch instantly, and video recording has duplicate frames. These introduce uncertainty but should affect both Wayland and X11 equally.
• Results: On average, Wayland has roughly 6.5ms more cursor latency than X11. The difference is close to 1 full screen refresh.
• Conclusion: These results prove there is a difference in input latency between X11 and Wayland with the author's hardware, but more testing on varied hardware is needed. The testing doesn't show higher input latency in general in Wayland for games.