Mutter Merges Experimental Variable Refresh Rate For GNOME 46

[spicfoo]

Open Collective Foundation is shutting down, not Open Collective.

Oh interesting. I wasn't aware there was a difference. Good clarification.

[skeevy420]

If you read through the PR or have been a working on anything remotely as involved, you will find the answer more aligned with the latter and see all the things they had to work through but if someone wants to whine about how along something takes without lifting a finger except to fling abuse at people working on it and wanting everything in a silver platter for free, this forum has plenty of such users too. Take your pick.

It only took three years of whining, but dammit if it didn't get results.

I'm playing the long game with the AMD Graphics GUI. Been whining about that one for over 10 years. They'll release it any day now. Any day now.

[pharmasolin]

They are still implementing it with a hidden flag, which they could have done years ago? And let people gather more feedback and reports. That's just stupid, the argument "gnome took their time to deliver new feature with a confidence" is a bs.

[You-]

They are still implementing it with a hidden flag, which they could have done years ago? And let people gather more feedback and reports. That's just stupid, the argument "gnome took their time to deliver new feature with a confidence" is a bs.

You could, you know, try reading the merge request? It is very interesting, with a lot of collaboration, finding and fixing issues, finding new problems, finding limitations in hardware, in kernel interfaces, in other assumptions and then working through as much of them as they can.

Those that have read the merge request probably find your line of questioning both very stupid and very condescending. Just try it, you might even enjoy reading it.

The bit that you wont see in the merge request is that there was also a parallel effort to re-architect parts of the mutter architecture with a central kms thread that this merge request then benefited from. That work was completed AFAIK in gnome 45 (or it might have been 44). That didnt block this work though, vrr was almost ready for gnome 44, but the main developer did not have the time then to push it over the line. With gnome 45, the re-architecting had landed which required the vrr merge request to be rebased. the main developer did not have time to complete this despite others assisting with the rebase.

(and unlike what people suggest, it still isn't at 100%, hence why behind an experimental flag. There is proposed kernel work to fix the last mile, something others have not done yet.)

[Brisse]

Does this work with both x.org and wayland?

This is for GNOME on Wayland specifically.

On x.org we have had VRR for several years already, even on GNOME.

Really looking forward to this though. I'm mostly using Wayland for various reasons but occasionally switch back and forth to x.org, VRR being one of the reasons, bad NVIDIA-experience being another. Now there will be one less reason to switch back and forth, and I'll probably end up using VRR a lot more as a result. Soon there will be no reason for x.org whatsoever.

I'm running a bit of a weird setup with both AMD and NVIDIA discreet GPU's at the same time, plus multi-monitors and modern GNOME on Wayland generally handles this situation much better. Actually I've not even managed to get all my monitors working at all when using x.org. It probably would have been no problem if not for that old monitor with only DVI-connection, which I only have on my AMD-graphics card.

[You-]

Gnome is backed by a redhat, and I supposed they would be interested in such feature and would push it.

If this is the case, I hope you're funding Red Hat.

[treba]

Can someone explain if 3 years for this PR was justified timeframe? Although I use ubuntu, gnome, for me as for a user it looked like a shit show, or it wasn't and it required a lot back and forth to verify if everything is in compliance with wayland, compositor, gnome senior devs, etc?
Gnome is backed by a redhat, and I supposed they would be interested in such feature and would push it.

Well, just curious.

While RedHats contributions are incredible important for Gnome, I wouldn't overestimate them. Gnome is a community project and this feature, like many others, was developed by a independent dev in their free time (reviewing was done to a big part by RedHat devs though). One reason why it took so long to land was that they didn't have time to finish it / address reviews - and nobody else stepped up to take the MR over. So big kudos to finally have finished it!

Another important thing about RedHat devs: they do a lot of work that benefits other DEs (like KDE) as well, such as a lot of Xwayland work, protocol/API work (e.g. the Wayland protocol for HDR - new kernel APIs for it), Pipewire, Gstreamer. So KDE benefits quite a bit from "Gnome" devs (not just RedHat or independents, but also from other companies like e.g. Collabora) and would be much worse if Gnome didn't exist.

[treba]

Does this work with both x.org and wayland?

No - and I wouldn't expect many new features to work on X11. While still semi-popular among users, developers have largely abandoned X11 because they know it's a lost cause and the sooner everyone switches to Wayland, the better.

Case in point: VRR is a great feature for video playback, as it allows displays to adopt a matching refresh rate for the video. Another feature shipping in Gnome 46 is video offloading in GTK4 (and Mutter getting better at it). This means video playback will get both visually better (better frame timing) and more efficient (see https://blog.gtk.org/2023/11/15/intr...phics-offload/). But both will only be available with Wayland, not X11, because the later just made it too hard to implement them well/sanely.

[caligula]

Ok, so now we only need HDR, 16 bit color channels, 8k and 16k support, 9+ vulkan devices, color management in Wayland and wide support for Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 etc. in all software, rootless X, Zink is still slower than old opengl drivers. Open source CUDA support, kms, opengl 4.6, and vulkan drivers for DisplayLink USB2/USB3.... that's the minimum before any normal user can use Linux on desktop.

[pieman]

Does this work with both x.org and wayland?

vrr has been working on xorg since, at least i can find from a quick google, 2017. xorg had vrr long before any wayland compositor. i personally didn't start using vrr until 2020 when i got my first freesync monitor and that was on xorg.