Hyprland Performance Survey

Background

I have been facing similar performance issues on both my machines, and it seems some others in the Discord had similar issues. It seemed to me like these issues were disproportionately affecting those with NVIDIA and Intel GPUs, and high resolution displays. The initial purpose of this survey was basically to see whether that was true or not, and to see if any interesting patterns could be spotted. With this document I also just want to share anything I think people might find somewhat interesting.

Hardware stuff

GPU

• Lots of NVIDIA respondents (~50%)
• Unfortunately not many Intel iGPU respondents (n=6)

Display resolution

• 1080p by far the most common display
• Just over 50% (n=22) of people use a second monitor

Laptop/desktop

• About a 50/50 split

## 
## Desktop  Laptop 
##      23      20

Lag / Frame Drops

• Over 80% of people do not experience lag / frame drops in Hyprland

During animations

On reading the graphs:

The y-axis estimates the total number of pixels that Hyprland has to render, combining all connected displays. The distance between points on the x-axis means nothing: it’s just random noise to help see multiple points with the same y-value.

• It’s a small number of people who experience performance issues during animations (n=9), so it’s hard to say anything with too much confidence
• Intel seems disproportionately affected, but the overall Intel group is tiny so who knows
• AMD users seem to have no performance issues at all, except maybe when you get to ~dual 4k displays
• NVIDIA users seem disproportionately affected by performance issues during animation
• In general, it seems that the more pixels your display has the greater the chance you will have performance issues during animations
  • We see a greater proportion of “Yes” responses starting around the 2x1440p mark
  • If you are at 1080p (~50% of users) your performance is ‘good’ no matter what GPU you’re using.

Only ~25% of Hyprland users have total display resolutions greater or equal to 2x1440p, which is perhaps when animation lag issues start to get more common

During window focus changes

• Again, very few people experience issues during window focus changes (n=8)
• It seems like this is mostly a problem for NVIDIA users
• The proportion of “Yes” answer seems to get greater above the 2x1440p line.

Are FPS drops/lag, better, or the same if there is inactivity before

I asked this question because the issues I have on both machines are more severe when there is inactivity. It seems that, for me, when the GPU clocks are slow at the start of an animation or window refocus, they don’t speed-up quickly enough to do these actions smoothly. After doing the action once or twice, the clocks are moving faster, and things get smoother. If I manually speed up my GPU clocks the animation and mouse lag get much better.

• It looks like a coin toss whether the problem gets better, worse, or stays the same:

Conclusion

• Hyprland performance is good for most people
• Some NVIDIA people seem to have issues with lag during window refocus
  • However, this might not by a Hyprland-exclusive thing: I have the exact same issue on KDE Plasma 6 RC1 (which has support for DMA-Fence deadlines, which I thought might help)
  • No evidence that this is widely related to GPU clock speeds being too slow
• Animation lag seems to affect more people the more pixels Hyprland has to render: issues become more common after about 2x1440p displays
  • Same is true for mouse lag refocus
• Lack of Intel respondents makes it hard to get any insight into their situation

Stuff I could have looked at but didn’t

• I asked a question about the severity of performance issues for those who faced them, and planned on looking how various variables influenced these responses, but since there were so few people who actually experienced issues (<10) I didn’t think there was much point
• Did not see how things differ for people on laptops vs. desktops
• Same for age of GPU