[sylware]

I think this is only the top of the iceberg.

I say that because I play some timing tight action games natively on elf(glibc)/linux. Let's take an example with one of the toughest: Silksong.

I was trying to beat lost lace, her timings were too tight and nearly at each try I was locked in some hardly humanly dodge-able pattern combination. I knew all of her patterns by heart after zillions of tries.

Then, I started to have strong suspicions: I closed all background apps, disconnected the network and try again... did beat her, first try, super ez, like she was transparent to me and slow, I could "read" her and react in time easily.

I am running a Zen2, 12 cores at ~4GHz... and native x11 with xorg, sooo... the main culprit seems to lie in game engine programming and then would not completely tied to wayland programming (don't worry, I am coding my own wayland compositor, so, I am going to move to wayland, well actually designing a 'binary layout' for a wayland compositor to be accurate).

I am now in a Silksong steel soul run, and you bet I'll keep this experience in mind, because when I watch video streams of other people fighting some bosses, I can cleary "read" their moves like it is "slower" and which seems much less "aggressive", but once I fight them on my system, nope, I get a much harder time at reading the boss patterns. The "closing all apps and disconnecting the network cable" did not change a thing here, because I am currently fighting "ez' bosses then I always manages to get rid of them before I get really used to their patterns again... we will see with later and harder bosses.

But this could be another [obvious] culprit: stress. I know I am very, VERY, sensitive to stress: it disrupts severely my mind and worse with very little of it. In other words, I would have "brain fog" while fighting a boss because of stress, and the time I did beat lost lace in one shot ez: I was "testing" something without the stress instead of actually trying to beat her... a abysmal difference.

[embedding-shape]

> I am running a Zen2, 12 cores at ~4GHz... and native x11 with xorg, sooo... the main culprit seems to lie in game engine programming and then would not completely tied to wayland programming (don't worry, I am coding my own wayland compositor, so, I am going to move to wayland, well actually designing a 'binary layout' for a wayland compositor to be accurate).

FWIW, I have similar frame pacing issues with Gnome/Mutter/Wayland with a AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU but that very issue doesn't happen with Xorg at all.

Might surface even larger issues if you go towards Wayland instead :)

[sylware]

In the end, I have strong suspicions on the unity game engine, some weird 'timing' stuff would be happening here, which would disrupt the boss pattern 'timings'. In your case, it seems it is "amplified" by the wayland compositor you are using (I guess you tested various compositor libraries, because many are based on the same libs... where could be hidding some latency, like is xorg but a bit more accute).

But as I said, in my personal case, I have to account for my stress intolerance which is significant, which does not help narrowing down those type of issues. Then, I am probably not one of the right guys to figure out that, but I'll do tests here and there to see if I can get some pertinent info.

I suggest you do the same than me anyway: shutdown all apps, and disconnect your network cable.