July 14, 2026
Clickbait, but make it measurable
Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
One gamer built a click-to-screen truth machine, and the comments instantly picked sides
TLDR: A Linux gamer built a device to measure real click-to-screen delay instead of trusting gaming folklore. Commenters loved the hard data, then immediately launched into fresh blame games over Wayland, old compatibility layers, and the eternal "just don’t use Nvidia" war.
A Linux gamer got tired of hearing "trust me, it feels faster" and did the most internet thing possible: built a homemade gadget to measure the time between a mouse click and the screen actually reacting. That let him test the big gaming arguments people love to fight about — old-school Linux display mode versus the newer one, variable refresh rate on or off, and whether a popular graphics tweak really helps or is just expensive-sounding snake oil.
And the community? Absolutely ate it up. One commenter basically declared, this is why they read Hacker News at all, while others praised the post for doing the rarest thing on the internet: bringing receipts. The biggest mini-drama centered on why some players think Wayland feels sluggish. One sharp reply suggested the real villain may not be Wayland itself, but people running older-style games through a compatibility layer and blaming the whole setup when lag appears. In other words: wrong suspect, huge sentence.
Then came the tribal energy. One commenter dropped the spiciest hardware take of the thread: Wayland is fine, just use AMD and KDE Plasma and maybe, uh, avoid Nvidia entirely. That’s less a suggestion and more a tech-world subtweet. There was even a funny moment of deja vu, with someone asking if this was the same author as another latency post — proof that Linux tuning discourse has become its own cinematic universe. In a sea of gaming myths, the crowd seemed thrilled to see one brave soul turn vibes into numbers.
Key Points
- •The article presents a custom-built system for measuring end-to-end Linux gaming input latency using USB-simulated mouse clicks and a photodiode attached to a monitor.
- •The author built the device after finding common Linux gaming latency advice difficult to verify objectively through normal use.
- •The final design uses an Adafruit QT Py RP2040, samples photodiode data about every 24 microseconds, and streams 12,000 samples per click to a host tool for latency calculation.
- •The planned comparisons focus on X11 versus native Wayland, VRR on versus off, and a DXVK low-latency fork on versus off.
- •The article also includes bonus comparisons for dxvk-low-latency versus uncapped default DXVK and native Wayland versus XWayland, while noting the main test scene was CPU-bound and static.