Wayland Protocols 1.30 Introduces New Protocol To Allow Screen Tearing

[omer666]

That feature was long overdue.
While I do agree tearing isn't very desirable, VSync is (to me) noticeably worse. To put it simply, in most cases I can't aim sh*t with VSync on.

[Quackdoc]

Looks like KDE devs are trying hard to transform Wayland into X11. First server side decorations now this. Absolute positioning, keyboard hooks and drawing extensions to go.

wayland has been playing catchup for a long time to get usable for many people sadly

[Khrundel]

Looks like KDE devs are trying hard to transform Wayland into X11. First server side decorations now this. Absolute positioning, keyboard hooks and drawing extensions to go.

[TemplarGR]

Yea and 30 fps is more than the eye can see! Certified console peasant.

1) The brain sees, not the eye. The image in front of you, is actually constructed inside your brain. It is not raw from your eye "sensor". Your brain already does heavy image/video processing on it without you spending any effort or realizing it.

2) Your eye can actually record extremely high "fps" in raw form. BUT, your brain cannot process them that much and spot any differences, because the brain doesn't spend energy wastefully, no reason to attempt to differentiate between changes at 10000 fps for example. Of course all this depends on the brain and its health/age. Younger healthier people have better processing capability/energy, so they tend to be more sensitive to higher fps changes. Practice also improves it, people who play high fps games constantly adopt to processing higher fps better than people who do not. There have actually been many scientific studies on this.

3) The motion effect of video and video games is actually produced in your brain. Your eye just receives the still images in raw form, but if they change quickly enough, your brain mixes them and creates the idea that what you are watching is live and continuous. This effect can be achieved at very low fps, even 20 can do it. 25-30 are enough and that is why they are used in movies. Some movies use 60 and many people can notice the difference, myself included, but honestly it is not that much of a difference. After a certain point though, the difference is very hard to notice. Going from 200fps, to 300 fps, for example, won't produce any noticeable effect for the vast majority of people. Even going from 60fps to 100fps will most of the time not do much.

4) The reason you "feel" low fps more when you are playing video games, is input lag, like another poster wrote previously. The higher the fps, the lower the latency between your input and the change on screen. Since you instantly "know and feel" your input and movement of keyboard/mouse, if that delay is significant, you can notice it and the game can feel "jerky". This is not about what the eye can see per se.

5) Having constant fps, is more important than having high fps. Your brain can adopt to a certain fps level and feel comfortable after a time. But if there are sudden dips in fps, they are ruining the flow and are noticeable. Constant 30fps, all the time, are far better than non-constant fps that hover around 45, sometimes 30, sometimes 60. You are going to notice the volatility and imbalance.

6) Console players are actually the kings, PC players are the peasants. Not only do they get inferior console ports most of the time, and no exclusives, but they are slaves to the idea that they have to purchase 5k PCs in order to be able to play the same games at the same settings at absurd FPS levels, and have an inferiority complex with just using more "lowly" efficient hardware to play games at lower resolutions, disable bad performance/quality ratio settings, and just be fine with a 30fps lock.

[TemplarGR]

Very much this. I am not surprised at how many people don't want screen tearing... in fact I bet grandma doesn't notice either scenario, but what absolutely shocks me are the people saying, "you don't need that" and who literally don't want you to have a choice. "If I don't like chocolate, YOU SHOULDN'T EVER BE ALLOWED TO HAVE IT, now go put your perfectly good hardware in a landfill and buy all new stuff for $2k+" ... they actually seem angry that anyone has a different experience. "It's the fault of the game engines" and those games will never be patched to fix any of it, but I suspect some of these people simply don't play the kinds of games we do, if any at all. It ain't just FPS, it's action/skill stuff in general, including sidescrollers. This control-freak/gatekeeping mentality being so common is always hard for me to fully accept. It's so irrational, and you see it in politics all the time. I guess utopians really do believe their vision is best for EVERYONE, and never listen long enough to notice even the people that agree with them on a policy have different overall visions. Put em on an island and they'd eventually literally kill each other off over what color loincloths should be allowed because they're "best for everyone". Does every minuscule aspect of ones life have to be publicly mandated? TEARING IS OPTIONAL UNDER THIS SPEC, AND NOT EVEN DEFAULT. But it's happening anyway, so you may as well fixate on something new.

EDIT: Speaking of fixation, I think I answered my own question: it seems to be a kind of hardcore idealism (lack of real world life experiences?) that won't be realistic about unsolvable problems (why are human beings corrupt/corruptible?) and so "this isn't the right/efficient way" can never be compromised on for the sake of facing practical realities. In such a person's mind, "all 'problems' are solvable, just use policy" but definitions thereof are so unwittingly arbitrary. Stop trying to FORCE the ideal in your mind to happen in real life. There are legitimate reasons it can't, or shouldn't (or at least can't or shouldn't YET), that you haven't considered. I know you're a dreamer and believe in hope and change, but you're sacrificing a lot of valuable things to something you yourself haven't completely fleshed out / tested. Applies to original topic as well. Thanks for reading.

So much BS in a single post.... Look pal, no one said you should not be allowed to have what you want. Of course, no one should be forced to offer it to you for free either, get your IDE ready and do the code yourself if you want X so badly, or pay someone to do it for you. But people are free to tell you "you don't need that" when discussing the feature and its usefulness, and most of the time they are correct to, if they provide solid arguments for their case. Calling them "control freaks" says more about you than about them.

As for a feature being optional and not even default, even optional non-default features increase the size of the code, and introduce more maintenance burden and perhaps even performance burden. Since open source resources are limited, most people don't want them to be spend on niche optional features 99% of the people don't really need. This doesn't make them control freaks just because you for some reason think you need that feature. You are the one who is acting irrationally writing stuff like this, empathy is not your forte it seems.

[mppix]

Very much this. I am not surprised at how many people don't want screen tearing... in fact I bet grandma doesn't notice either scenario, but what absolutely shocks me are the people saying, "you don't need that" and who literally don't want you to have a choice. "If I don't like chocolate, YOU SHOULDN'T EVER BE ALLOWED TO HAVE IT, now go put your perfectly good hardware in a landfill and buy all new stuff for $2k+" ... they actually seem angry that anyone has a different experience. "It's the fault of the game engines" and those games will never be patched to fix any of it, but I suspect some of these people simply don't play the kinds of games we do, if any at all. It ain't just FPS, it's action/skill stuff in general, including sidescrollers. This control-freak/gatekeeping mentality being so common is always hard for me to fully accept. It's so irrational, and you see it in politics all the time. I guess utopians really do believe their vision is best for EVERYONE, and never listen long enough to notice even the people that agree with them on a policy have different overall visions. Put em on an island and they'd eventually literally kill each other off over what color loincloths should be allowed because they're "best for everyone". Does every minuscule aspect of ones life have to be publicly mandated? TEARING IS OPTIONAL UNDER THIS SPEC, AND NOT EVEN DEFAULT. But it's happening anyway, so you may as well fixate on something new.

EDIT: Speaking of fixation, I think I answered my own question: it seems to be a kind of hardcore idealism (lack of real world life experiences?) that won't be realistic about unsolvable problems (why are human beings corrupt/corruptible?) and so "this isn't the right/efficient way" can never be compromised on for the sake of facing practical realities. In such a person's mind, "all 'problems' are solvable, just use policy" but definitions thereof are so unwittingly arbitrary. Stop trying to FORCE the ideal in your mind to happen in real life. There are legitimate reasons it can't, or shouldn't (or at least can't or shouldn't YET), that you haven't considered. I know you're a dreamer and believe in hope and change, but you're sacrificing a lot of valuable things to something you yourself haven't completely fleshed out / tested. Applies to original topic as well. Thanks for reading.

Tearing sucks. And it sucks even more if it is optional.
Simple reason is that this is not going to fly on some DEs that want to offer a modern experience that is competitive with WinMac.
So forget uniform Linux DE behavior (with KDE offering bad behavior..) or reasonably well tested Linux behavior (only most popular DE is tested if at all).
Lack of consistency/predictability results in lack of adoption.

.. or are you really suggesting we need like 600 active Linux distributions?

[Quackdoc]

As an fps gamer, I think this is very nice.

On thing though that I am still missing: With x.org I can globally enable triple buffering for OGL games (or rather everything) via x.org.conf (Option "TearFree" "true"). While I understand that triple buffering adds minimal latency, I think this is the very best compromise (when not having vrr display at hand and not being a pro gamer^^). It would be absolutely fantastic, if one day one could force triple buffering with wayland for ogl/vulkan games.

this is how wayland compositors already work.

[Quackdoc]

What scaling in general does, is "fixing" displays that have too high resolutions for their physical size. If you have for example a 60 inch 4k monitor, you don't need scaling at all. But if you have a 15 inch 4k monitor, you do, cause everything will look tiny. Still, integer scaling is perfect for such resolutions and works just fine without any issues.

not fixing, since it's not broken, what is broken is how operating systems and UI toolkits handle scaling.

Problems arise when someone has lower resolutions than 4K, for example 1440p. Then scaling like 200% is too large. But a resolution like 1440p is not too far off 1080p. While 30% scaling might seem nice for such a case, most of the time you can be served by just increasing font sizes.

A shame that there is a LOT of wiggle room on a lot of resolution, sizes, and even form factors.

On windows IIRC you can even increase window panel sizes and other stuff as well, alongside the fonts. Used to in the past at least. So you can get by without a universal 130% scaling that will always get blurry and/or use more resources.

many windows apps handle fractional scaling just fine. you often have to go into properties and change the what scales the application, but often times when you do that it works fine

For me, small scaling factors don't have any real use or purpose for the vast majority of PC monitors. And 200% scaling was perfectly for those who have small 4K monitors. It would be fine if fractional scaling existed sure, more features never hurt. But why spent resources on implementing it when eventually everyone and their dog is going to be using a 4K display?

when you have a 4k monitor, like I said I do, I don't know if you missed that, but I have a 4k monitor, fractional scaling for me is Necessary. the shift to 4k displays means that good fractional scaling is more necessary then ever before... in fact I don't know a single person, personally, that has a 4k monitor without fractional scaling.

[andre30correia]

most of this problems talked here dont happen if you use ubuntu

[middy]

Very much this. I am not surprised at how many people don't want screen tearing... in fact I bet grandma doesn't notice either scenario, but what absolutely shocks me are the people saying, "you don't need that" and who literally don't want you to have a choice. "If I don't like chocolate, YOU SHOULDN'T EVER BE ALLOWED TO HAVE IT, now go put your perfectly good hardware in a landfill and buy all new stuff for $2k+" ... they actually seem angry that anyone has a different experience. "It's the fault of the game engines" and those games will never be patched to fix any of it, but I suspect some of these people simply don't play the kinds of games we do, if any at all. It ain't just FPS, it's action/skill stuff in general, including sidescrollers. This control-freak/gatekeeping mentality being so common is always hard for me to fully accept. It's so irrational, and you see it in politics all the time. I guess utopians really do believe their vision is best for EVERYONE, and never listen long enough to notice even the people that agree with them on a policy have different overall visions. Put em on an island and they'd eventually literally kill each other off over what color loincloths should be allowed because they're "best for everyone". Does every minuscule aspect of ones life have to be publicly mandated? TEARING IS OPTIONAL UNDER THIS SPEC, AND NOT EVEN DEFAULT. But it's happening anyway, so you may as well fixate on something new.

EDIT: Speaking of fixation, I think I answered my own question: it seems to be a kind of hardcore idealism (lack of real world life experiences?) that won't be realistic about unsolvable problems (why are human beings corrupt/corruptible?) and so "this isn't the right/efficient way" can never be compromised on for the sake of facing practical realities. In such a person's mind, "all 'problems' are solvable, just use policy" but definitions thereof are so unwittingly arbitrary. Stop trying to FORCE the ideal in your mind to happen in real life. There are legitimate reasons it can't, or shouldn't (or at least can't or shouldn't YET), that you haven't considered. I know you're a dreamer and believe in hope and change, but you're sacrificing a lot of valuable things to something you yourself haven't completely fleshed out / tested. Applies to original topic as well. Thanks for reading.

choice is bad. it allows for people to be different than you. that bad.