Mesa 20.3 Picks Up New Capabilities To Help With Display Presentation Jitter, Stuttering

[mcoffin]

Since these are extensions, they have to be actively used by applications or game engines before we have any benefit...

Luckily, the features have been in OpenGL and Vulkan for a while, so likely there's already support out there, it's just being disabled as the mesa driver previously didn't advertise support for them!

[mcoffin]

If anyone wanted to, they could add something to the drivers to allow forcing different modes. Or add it as a drirc option per executable.

Wait, is this already possible? Could you give an example of how to force a given extension (say, this GLX sync one) on? I'm already familiar with drirc, but I didn't know that forcing extension usage like this was possible. I've only really used it for mesa_glthread, a few version overrides, and adaptive_sync.

[mcoffin]

Just did some testing with this, and it seems that Firefox will try to use this by default, which is unfortunate, as things like videos that render lower than your display's refresh rate will definitely experience some tearing. Obviously, adding a drirc config for vblank_mode=3 is a decent workaround, but unfortunate that users will have to add more config to get a tear-free experience now (or maybe this is an Xorg driver problem... I don't have any experience with the Xorg drivers as I'm (primarily) on Wayland).