GNOME Work Moving Ahead On Deep Color Support, Triple Buffering

It's been a while since having any major break-through changes to talk about for GNOME contributed by Canonical's prolific developer Daniel Van Vugt, but he's been at the grind making progress on some big ticket items.

In his latest weekly development update he shared progress is being made on two important items: 10-bit deep color support and triple buffering.

For several months now deep color support for Ubuntu has been one of the focuses by Van Vugt, but initially was a setback due to the changes being more invasive than he initially anticipated. The changes are more involved but he is back to making progress on the deep color support, which is great as the Linux desktop has been lagging behind Windows and macOS in the deep color support.

He notes over the past week he briefly resolved all discussions that were blocking the deep color support and is now awaiting more testing.

One of the other interesting GNOME features being pursued by Daniel this year has been dynamic triple buffering. The motivation there has been to dynamically engage in triple buffering in order to cause the GPU to ramp up its clock frequency when needed if otherwise it's falling behind in its rendering work. It's less than an ideal situation to get the GPU to work faster and temporarily causes that extra frame latency, but it does seem to do the job in getting the GPU performance to boost when needed.

This past week he revised his triple buffering code and is also now compatible with his pending NVIDIA latency fix work and related changes along with further testing and updated documentation.

For those interested in these topics, details on Ubuntu Discourse. Hopefully both of these features will be vetted in time for making it into the GNOME 40 release this spring.