GNOME 43's Mutter Lands Max BPC Property Support To Deal With Monitor Issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME 43's Mutter Lands Max BPC Property Support To Deal With Monitor Issues

Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-43-Does-Max-BPC

[You-]

It is interesting how Phoronix picks which mutter merge requests to follow...

I wonder if Michael has an RSS feed that just follows Dan as opposed to mutter.

[Amano]

I guess it is rather that Daniel specializes on hardware and performance related issues (fps, bitdepth, scaling, refresh rate) that Phoronix also focuses on. But I might be wrong though...

It is not that his work is more important but rather thematically more apt.

[aufkrawall]

It is interesting how Phoronix picks which mutter merge requests to follow...

And for whatever reason, the Phoronix coverage of other compositors' MRs is far less frequent...

[Brisse]

My Asus MG279Q (8bpc?) doesn't like 144hz and I have to run it at 120hz. I wonder if this will let me bump it up to 144hz without problems.

Bumping it to 144hz often results in a vertical line in the middle where the picture doesn't quite line up, and the entire image is slightly blurry, mostly noticeable on text. Even those few times it successfully manages to change to 144hz without the before-mentioned problem, I notice some rare but occasional flickering in one of the upper corners of the display.

Edit: Just updated to gnome-shell+mutter 43~beta-1 and switched between different modes a dozen times without a hitch. Even 144hz works fine at the moment. It might be a bit early to tell for sure whether this helped my case, but it seems it might have.

Edit2: Still getting that slight flickering in the upper right corner at 144hz. It's just one or two lines, a dozen pixels wide, but definitely noticeable. Back to 120hz it is.

[You-]

I guess it is rather that Daniel specializes on hardware and performance related issues (fps, bitdepth, scaling, refresh rate) that Phoronix also focuses on. But I might be wrong though...

It is not that his work is more important but rather thematically more apt.

If it was that, it would make sense. But it isnt,

I would expect phoronix to have jumped all over the merge requests by Dor Asakayo (VRR) and Sebastian Wick (color and High Dynamic Range including HDR - the stuff promoted on phoronix is actually at best a stop gap and at worst useless as it will be in the same release as the full fledged support being worked on by others).

It also cant be limited to performance support because there have been some larger large performance improvements committed recently, with no corresponding news articles on here.

I suspect he has Dan on an rss feed which makes his contributions easier to spot. Or i remember him linking to some Ubuntu weekly reports previously, so maybe its from them.

Its just different from how I would expect Mutter/Gnome-shell to be covered and found newsworthy.

(btw, none of this is an attack on Dan - he is doing good work and fixing real issues.)

[middy]

My Asus MG279Q (8bpc?) doesn't like 144hz and I have to run it at 120hz. I wonder if this will let me bump it up to 144hz without problems.

Bumping it to 144hz often results in a vertical line in the middle where the picture doesn't quite line up, and the entire image is slightly blurry, mostly noticeable on text. Even those few times it successfully manages to change to 144hz without the before-mentioned problem, I notice some rare but occasional flickering in one of the upper corners of the display.

have you tried a different displayport cable? a lot of times, its a bad cable. for whatever reason, QC with DP cables are pretty bad.

[EvilHowl]

And for whatever reason, the Phoronix coverage of other compositors' MRs is far less frequent...

I certainly have seen multiple articles about Weston (the reference Wayland compositor) and Kwin, but you have to consider that GNOME is the biggest and most used desktop environment, as well as the default one on most distributions. Of course Mutter is going to get more coverage than XFCE's Xfwm.

[Charlie68]

Indeed, if you read Phoronix, you have the distinct feeling that mutter's only dev is Daniel van Vugt.

[user1]

Indeed, if you read Phoronix, you have the distinct feeling that mutter's only dev is Daniel van Vugt.

Well, he's responsible for most of Gnome's optimization work, so maybe that's why. I remember when Gnome was a laggy mess a few years ago, so when Ubuntu switched to Gnome with 17.10, he started working on all the various optimizations.