Mesa 23.3 Lands Optional Support For Allowing Game Tearing On Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 23.3 Lands Optional Support For Allowing Game Tearing On Wayland

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the "PresentOptionAsyncMayTear" option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-23.3-Wayland-Tearing

[ayumu]

The one promise of Wayland to never show imperfect frames... broken.

They could have focused their efforts into making triple buffering work really well, as well as dynamic refresh such as freesync.

But no, they instead settle for the usual mediocrity.

[shmerl]

The one promise of Wayland to never show imperfect frames... broken.

What's the point of making promises that aren't useful. If you want to break frames, you should be able to, instead of "we promised, so you are forbidden to".

[Viki Ai]

Whelp, that's torn it!

[smitty3268]

The one promise of Wayland to never show imperfect frames... broken.

They could have focused their efforts into making triple buffering work really well, as well as dynamic refresh such as freesync.

But no, they instead settle for the usual mediocrity.

Wayland is still showing perfect frames. This is about allowing X to draw imperfect frames while running on top of Wayland, that's not really any different than saying the QT or GTK can draw broken frames on Wayland either (not that I'm saying they do).

[Berniyh]

They could have focused their efforts into making triple buffering work really well, as well as dynamic refresh such as freesync.

Uhm, it's not like these are excluded by having the option to allow for tearing.

Also not really sure what you mean by "making triple buffering work really well". What kind of tricks do you have up your sleeves?

[omer666]

The one promise of Wayland to never show imperfect frames... broken.

They could have focused their efforts into making triple buffering work really well, as well as dynamic refresh such as freesync.

But no, they instead settle for the usual mediocrity.

As far as I know, both triple buffering and variable refresh rate are supported by Wayland. Those are not implemented in GNOME yet, but there are efforts to merge the corresponding patches (including GUI configuration for when to enable VRR and tearing.)

[Kjell]

Wayland is close to being really good for me if only direct scanout wasn't breaking vblank with VRR

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7714#issuecomment-1694356639

[AnAccount]

What's the point of making promises that aren't useful. If you want to break frames, you should be able to, instead of "we promised, so you are forbidden to".

But this is not that.... this is allowing for someone else (the game developers) to break my frames on my computer. It would be a different thing, if there were a user switch to allow/disallow it. But as it is now, this extension allows a thirdparty to break my frames.

[smitty3268]

It would be a different thing, if there were a user switch to allow/disallow it.

That's a good idea. Maybe they could call it PresentOptionAsyncMayTear.