An analysis conducted by Igor Vyubunchich, who works at Canonical in the field of high-performance computing products, involved extensive testing of the KDE PLASMA 6.4 sessions on X11 and Wayland, focusing on energy consumption and performance. In June, Igor shared his findings on the capabilities of KDE Plasma 6.4, concluding that the Wayland session exerts higher CPU and GPU loads compared to the X11 session. Subsequent articles by Igor delved deeper into evaluating the performance of both sessions.
During the initial testing phase on a Lenovo IDEAPAD 3 laptop with an integrated AMD GPU, it was observed that the Wayland session consistently maintained an 8% GPU load, with periodic spikes that completely maxed out the GPU every 2-3 seconds. In contrast, the X11 session displayed negligible CPU and GPU loads during idle times. Further examination using the utility tool radeontop revealed higher resource consumption in the Wayland session, particularly when the “color accuracy” profile was enabled in the screen settings. The table below shows the average GPU load for various components under similar conditions with applications running and data collection conducted every second for a minute.
| Metric | Wayland + Power Efficiency | Wayland + Color Accuracy | X11 |
| Graphics Pipe | 3.31 | 4.03 | 2.47 |
| Vertex Grouper + Tessellator | 0.33 | 0.30 | 0.11 |
| Texture Addresser | 0.90 | 2.03 | 0.78 |
| Shader Export | 2.24 | 3.03 | 1.42 |