Triple Buffering Likely Not Landing Until GNOME 42

In the works over the past year for the GNOME desktop environment is dynamic triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in rendering the desktop. In doing so, the GPU utilization should increase and the GPU clock frequencies in turn should ramp up to meet the demand - thereby ideally getting the rendering back on track if prior frames were running late. That triple buffering support has been re-based to the GNOME 40 code-base but still is unlikely to land until the next cycle with GNOME 42.

Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his prolific GNOME contributions has re-based the triple buffering code to GNOME 40. Daniel has been working on this GNOME triple buffering support on and off for a number of months to improve the rendering performance with a particular focus/need on Intel integrated graphics.

He noted today that while the code has been ported to GNOME 40, it's most likely not going to be merged until GNOME 42 given the timing with some remaining items left to complete.

Atomic mode-setting in Mutter recently landed as one of the previous blockers. While X.Org support for triple buffering is in place, the native back-end / Wayland code still needs to be completed among any other lingering tasks. Thus this measure to temporarily increase GPU utilization likely won't be merged until GNOME 42 for the autumn release. With Ubuntu 21.04 skipping GNOME 40, with Ubuntu 21.10 is likely when they will jump to GNOME 42 directly.