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by hurricanepootis 241 days ago
I use fractional scaling on the desktop (150%) and haven't noticed any performance degradation or unexpected slowness. Do you have any information on what someone should be looking for?

Overall, fractional scaling is the killer feature on KDE Wayland, especially with its XWayland integration. Whenever I use fractional scaling in GNOME, XWayland gets a resolution that is way higher than my actual display. I believe it is done so in a way (I could go be wrong) where XWayland gets a 2X resolution of whatever the fractional scaling resolution is, so it can be down sampled to the fractional scaling resolution simply. This results in me having to change the resolution in my games, which a lot of them don't support custom resolutions. Then, I have to use gamescope, which has shitty mouse input and increase performance degradation, especially on a laptop APU.

1 comments

I was specifically referring to the down sampling that you refer to on GNOME. I don't think I've seen a linux desktop environment where this isn't the case. The result is that when you drag or resize windows (or have any movement on your screen in general) your cpu/gpu spikes. While I'm sure it's not a huge deal on modern hardware, The performance penalty on my dell xps 13 from 2015 is pretty significant, and it looks like the cpu usage when dragging/resizing windows doubles on linux compared to windows 10, which makes sense. battery life also takes a serious hit. Since no one has seemed to be able to figure this out, I wonder if it's a compositor specific thing? like there's no way to change this behavior without rewriting wayland or something.