I’m on Arch, with Hyprland as my Window Manager. I use an RTX 3070.

For Wayland specifically, the driver was next to unusable for a while. I jumped ship from Windows in Sept. 2023. Beginning with driver 560 iirc, it got a lot better, plus their engineers pushed a lot of changes across the Wayland ecosystem to implement explicit sync support (a net positive, but before this, Nvidia was too stubborn to implement implicit sync, so bad screen tearing was unavoidable). Also there’s been a slow migration to using the GSP processor on newer cards. They claim it can improve performance, which may be true, but I also recently learned it helps them keep some more parts of their code closed-source, which is likely why it’s required to use the open source kernel modules.

At this point, though, it does feel very smooth and I can play games like The Finals at competitive framerates!

But relative to my performance under Windows, it’s still worse, mainly in average framerate. Like others have said, DX12 games seem to be hit hardest. I sometimes have to run lower settings to compensate. Also, if my VRAM gets filled, Xwayland apps all break, so I have to be very careful with higher quality texture quality especially.

Anyways, to answer your question, I think an average gamer doesn’t notice the degraded performance, without benchmarking or comparing framerates back to back— it still runs pretty smooth and framerates are still pretty high. If they aren’t happy with it, they’ll drop quality settings or resolution, just like they’d do under Windows.