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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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The pros and cons boil down to wayland has no awesomewm-like window manager and Xorg has, well, awesomewm…

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.

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.

Wayland fixes a number of bugs and fundamental issues in X.Org. It is also much more actively developed, and it seems likely that over time new hardware will stop working with X.Org due to bugs nobody is interested in fixing (this is already the case for the Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers).

On the other hand, Wayland also introduces a number of additional bugs. However, some distros like Fedora have enabled it by default for years. In practice, most of the bugs relate to at least one of Nvidia’s drivers, DPI scaling, and DEs with less mature support. If you’re using an AMD GPU, 1080p display, and GNOME, you’ll likely have few issues and possibly even a better experience compared to X.Org.

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.)

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…