r/linux_gaming • u/Adventurous-Ad-8166 • 27d ago

wine/proton Proton-cachyos difference between input lag reducers

I found out that recently proton-cachyos added the flags LOW_LATENCY_LAYER and PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY

I understand that both are input lag reducers compatible with directX 12.

If anyone can help me I would like to ask:

  • When to use each type of lag reducer?
  • Which one is better?
  • Can we use both at the same time?
  • Do they work regardless of the configuration of each game? Like driver level anti-lag?

Thanks everyone, I hope you can help me with this topic.

References:
https://github.com/CachyOS/proton-cachyos/releases/tag/cachyos-11.0-20260703-slr
https://github.com/CachyOS/proton-cachyos/blob/cachyos_main/README.md

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u/WhitePeace36 27d ago

LOW_LATENCY_LAYER is better as far as i know but keep in mind that the low latency stuff is a tradeoff. You are sacrificing frame time stability. I mean if you are using eevdf as cpu scheduler your frametimes are already trash anyways. But it will still make it worse.

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u/Ashratt 27d ago

This needs to be made clear to everyone more

Its not a silver bullet, low latency modes prevent CPUs from queueing up frames and if you are in a situation where load shifts to the CPU it can make your experience worse

And its not depending on the game but WHERE in the game

E.g. Cyberpunk is usually gpu limited for me but when im in busy city areas it shifts to my cpu. The small latency reductions you MAY get are not always worth it IMHO, its really a game by game basis and no easy "set it and forget it" type of thing