Intel Tiger Lake VRR Support Being Worked On For Linux, More PCI IDs Introduced

With the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe graphics are considered stable as in enabled by default but that doesn't mean they are done working on features for the highly-anticipated next-gen Intel graphics.

One of the latest areas seeing patches for Gen12 / Tiger Lake is around Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) such as for DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync. That should come as little surprise with VRR being supported in the hardware since Gen11 / Ice Lake and Intel developers working on VRR Linux code for a while. The latest patches are about putting the various VRR bits into place for Gen12 graphics.

There have been various VRR patches floating around this week and the new bits for Tiger Lake (TGL).

VRR is for reducing stuttering and tearing particularly for gaming but usage of VRR can also help with power management when dropping the refresh rate intentionally for that purpose. Besides VRR being useful for Intel in power-savings, with Gen12 graphics expected to be another big upgrade to their graphics architecture, variable refresh rate is of increasing relevance to Intel for gaming especially with their forthcoming Xe graphics cards.

These various VRR Tiger Lake patches are coming too late to find them in Linux 5.7 but should in turn make it for Linux 5.8 with the autumn Linux distributions like Ubuntu 20.10 and Fedora 33.

Also on the Tiger Lake front we've been seeing a few more PCI IDs added to the Linux stack in recent days. They are 0x9AC0, 0x9AC9, 0x9AD9, and 0x9AF8 and appear to be Tiger Lake "GT2" class parts.