Honestly, depends on you GPU and the game. Nvidia has been quite reluctant with their Wayland support for a while, while AMD is often pretty even. Here are some benchmarks from early 2023. However, recently there were some improvements for XWayland which may improve performance significantly (there was a post on Lemmy just today or yesterday).

If you use a distro/DE that install both by default (like Ubuntu) I’d recommend to just test it and then decide for your case.

I personally love Wayland for my system. I use Sway for mine and with support for VRR with my monitor, a lot of the vsync problems people talk about goes away (at least for me). I will say, some things that rely on Xorg screen sharing (Like Discord) will only share Xwayland windows. This is fixed in most applications, but not all. Also screen recording in general is a bit lacking. My main pro for Wayland is I use multiple monitors, and unlike Xorg which caps the refresh rate for the full desktop to the lowest (which for me is 75hz), Wayland allows different refresh rates per monitor, which means if I drag a vsync game over to a different monitor, the fps cap changes.

Wayland is also vastly improved by moving over to PipeWire instead of Pulseaudio. I’ve never had a singular problem with PipeWire and it’s drop-in pretty much. I recommend that as well. PipeWire is compatible with applications that use PulseAudio so you shouldn’t even notice a difference at worst, and will notice an improvement in sound latency most likely.

I think the main drawback about Waypand right now is people have VASTLY different experiences. Which is why I say just try it out. Most big DEs like KDE and GNOME have Wayland sessions that you can choose if you just install the wayland parts. Worst case scenario you go “This sucks” and go back. Wayland is only getting better, though, and I find that a lot of the problems I had even just 6 months ago are pretty much gone. Check in often and just keep your Xorg stuff laying around. That’s the beauty of Linux.

A few gaming related downsides for me:

There’s no way to disable the compositor, so if you play any windowed games, you’ll have some extra input lag. It shouldn’t matter if you play fullscreen games though.

Missing Xorg tools like xinput or xrandr. Maybe I’m too finicky, but sometimes I can’t find the exact mouse speed I want through the settings GUI (for example, in KDE Plasma there are 11 steps from slowest to fastest), and through xinput commands I can just type any speed I want, which is very useful if one step feels too slow but the next one feels too fast.

I also want to increase the screen’s gamma level sometimes and I haven’t found any way to do that at all on Wayland.

One pro of Wayland is better multi-monitor. X11 can’t really handle mixed refresh rates, nor multi-monitor VRR, and per-monitor DPI scaling isn’t easily done. Of course, Nvidia doesn’t support Wayland VRR yet, nor does GNOME, but Plasma or wlroots on AMD should work. Wlroots btw is the Wayland compositor library e.g. Sway and Hyprland is based on.

Forced vsync has been a problem for gaming on Wayland, though that’s in the process of changing due to the tearing protocol, at least on Plasma and wlroots, doesn’t seem like GNOME has picked it up yet.

Really, what it should come down to as an individual is that all of the x11 devs left to work on Wayland because x11 is unmaintainable.

Use Wayland if it works for you, if you find something that doesn’t work, go back to x11 and find the issue tracker and switch back if you care for the benefits later.

The benefits:

1. A better security model
2. More efficient rendering
3. Better animations
4. Better support for multi displays (mixed refresh rate/dpi)
5. HDR (soon)
6. Better color management (soon)

The only problems I have currently is sway doesn’t support single window capture and the XWayland clipboard isn’t great.

Wayland is generally great. The only reason I’ve stuck with X11 is a few random bugs and issues that still aren’t solved in Wayland.

I’m planning on switching over to Wayland fully at the end of this year. Seems like every 6 months I try it and there are less issues than before.

Try them both, plenty of folks have no issues at all running Wayland right from the start, so give it a go and see what happens.

Many users seem to think that the only problem is nvidia, but it’s not true, app compatibility is still a very noticeable problem sometimes.
For example, as far as I know there are still no on-screen keyboards, except for those integrated into desktops, if they have them at all.

Xorg is not even in maintenance mode at this point. It’s practically a zombie (and the devs are pretty clear that if you want that to change, YOU will have to step up to do it)

Wayland has the basics done bar Gnome being Gnome and Nvidia being Nvidia, and the uncommon use cases are having solutions built for them as we speak, although quality software will inevitably take time. Especially if we don’t want Wayland to end up an Xorg v2, but splintered.

been on Wayland with amdgpu for several years due to multi monitor and haven’t looked back. endeavourOS with kde currently, 7900xtx, 4k/144 and 4k/60

Try it. Easy enough to have both options on your machine. I poke into Wayland about every 6-12 months, then go back to X11 because I just can’t be fucked with fixing shit that works under X11 and is broken with Wayland. Plenty of people try Wayland and don’t have any issues. Eventually just about everyone will be on Wayland, if that makes a difference to you. I’ll check it again in maybe near the end of 2023.

Wayland is great these days. Love Wayland for touchsceen. Only thing missing for me is software kvm like synergy. Looks to be on the near horizon though.

Ive redid my arch install with 27 4k monitor and decided to go with gnome . Then switched to Wayland because their fractional scaling for hidpi works great comparing to x11. Overall I very much like it, I used to have various small artifacts on x11 and now they’re gone. Waiting for xwayland scaling fix and it’s all I need personally.

This is something that I am sure will be solved eventually, but one of the major weaknesses of Wayland is the lack of lightweight standalone compositors.

For example, if I want a lightweight stacking window manager on X, I can choose between Openbox, Fluxbox, FVWM, IceWM, Pekwm, JWM, Window Maker, hell even twm if I were a masochist. I have tried out all of these at one point or another and they all have something to offer users. But using Wayland, there’s, uhh, labwc, and that’s it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?

The situation for tiling window managers is similar, with Sway being the only one that feels mature.

I plan on migrating from Openbox to labwc at some point in the future, once it’s ready. labwc itself is really good, but some of the other programs I need to recreate my setup aren’t there yet. Someday…

I’m not a distro hopper. I settled on Ubuntu, which was fairly quick to adopt Wayland. I haven’t had any issues beyond the occasional app (kitty) that doesn’t show decorations properly without minor tweaking. (And, despite its name, X forwarding over SSH works just fine.)

A major downside of even trying Wayland is that you need to throw away all the knowledge and all the little tools you built up over the years on X and start over from scratch. And that without a guarantee that you won’t have to come back to X due to the lack of hardware support on one out of two major graphics card vendors.