Sway Compositor Lands Wayland Tearing Control Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Sway Compositor Lands Wayland Tearing Control Support

A one year old merge request to support Wayland's Tearing Control protocol (tearing-control-v1) has finally been merged into the Sway compositor codebase...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-Tearing-Control-Lands

[varikonniemi]

"every frame is perfect" is good marketing speak but divorced from reality. Sadly the authors of wayland did not even think about the possibility that tearing is absolutely necessary for certain use cases.

[avis]

"every frame is perfect" is good marketing speak but divorced from reality. Sadly the authors of wayland did not even think about the possibility that tearing is absolutely necessary for certain use cases.

Works great for kiosks!

[Quackdoc]

I personally don't see the need for tearing, but it's nice for the folk that do want it.

[NateHubbard]

tearing is absolutely necessary for certain use cases.

Can you elaborate? When do you want it to tear?

[faugus]

The tearing protocol adds input lag and causes jittering in some games.
Allowing tearing is important specially for competitive FPS games, where you need the least input lag possible.

[Kjell]

For tearing to work in Sway you'll need kernel drm/atomic async flip patches. Hope they'll make it in time for 6.11

• https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/[email protected]/
• https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/[email protected]/

Edit: V2 patch is currently the last remaining puzzle piece

• https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/[email protected]/

[Brittle2]

Can you elaborate? When do you want it to tear?

gaming

[user1]

Can you elaborate? When do you want it to tear?

I personally don't want to see tearing and I play all my games with in-game vsync enabled. But forced vsync on the protocol level adds up some input lag, so this is why it's undesirable for gaming, even if you enable in-game vsync. For competitive gamers this is a deal breaker because they need the absolute lowest input latency possible.

[Quackdoc]

I personally don't want to see tearing and I play all my games with in-game vsync enabled. But forced vsync on the protocol level adds up some input lag, so this is why it's undesirable for gaming, even if you enable in-game vsync. For competitive gamers this is a deal breaker because they need the absolute lowest input latency possible.

with how most wayland compositors handle vsync, I don't think this is an issue. The game can still run as it pleases, it's just the server that waits to display the frame, if your game is running uncapped. the input itself isn't effected, even if the compositor doesn't display the update with a tear.

it's essentially vulkan mailbox. The input should still be processed immediately.

there could be benefit to actually looking at a tear, but the input latency is not effected.