Performance was worse than X11 for a long time[1] and is finally catching up for some singular compositors. However most compositors still have worse performance and every single compositor has different quirks. Latency still seems to be worse across the board. In my test not one Wayland compositor could beat xterm input/output latency on X11 because of enforced global vsync.
(And Sway has a configurable delay; since Sway is so simple to render, the recommended max_frame_time value is 1ms — i.e. the compositor has the very last millisecond before vblank to composite, and everything before that is for the apps.)
Not really fair to compare with non-vsync systems — tearing is completely unacceptable ;)
Well, of all the monitors I have, I think one of them supports >60Hz refresh. Overwhelmingly (including on windows7) I've disabled compositing because it makes the machine seems laggy. A bit of tearing when I'm scrolling fast, or moving a window doesn't bother me. About the only time its annoying is low frame-rate video.
So, if you think about what the tearing is it makes sense, your getting a partially drawn frame because the application didn't provide the full frame in time for the vsync, waiting to display the update for and additional one or two frames simply to assure a complete frame can only slow things down.
You probably don't need it, but you can use it if you really want. If you're using a fullscreen compositing WM in X11 then single applications can't disable vsync, it's the same situation as with Wayland.
Wayland compositors can have something called direct-scan out, which passes the buffer for the full screen application to KMS, which should be superior to Xorg unredirection (Wayland doesn't "redirect" windows in the first place though).
1.:https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-32...