GNOME 3.34's Mutter Lands A Last-Minute Performance Fix For NVIDIA

GNOME 3.34 is expected for release next Tuesday while squeezing into Mutter this morning is an important performance fix for those running GNOME on X11 with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver.

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his many GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years has been toying with this NVIDIA fix/optimization the past few months and merged the code this morning to Mutter. This change that landed is the removal of GLX threaded swap wait handling for the NVIDIA binary driver.

The GLX threaded swap wait for NVIDIA ended up stalling both the GPU and CPU as it was no longer serving its intended performance with the current state of Mutter's code. The issue it originally was designed to address around unthrottled rendering has already been fundamentally addressed in a separate patch that landed this summer.

So just in time for GNOME 3.34 should be this fix helping the NVIDIA Linux performance, among many other speed optimizations that landed during the 3.33 development series.