Intel Preparing To Restore Frame-Buffer Compression For Tiger Lake

This summer Intel disabled frame-buffer compression for Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. While FBC helps conserve memory bandwidth and can be beneficial to power-savings, under-run issues and related problems resorted Intel to disabling this common feature for Tiger Lake.

But now the open-source Intel Linux developers are preparing to restore frame-buffer compression for benefiting these latest-generation Intel laptops. Well, at least in part.

The patches are out there for restoring FBC on Tiger Lake. But the exception is PSR2 panel self refresh will see FBC disabled. It seems with PSR2 the frame-buffer compression does not work reliably and what led to the random under-runs seen months ago.

PSR2 is the updated eDP capability that allows for partial frame updates and other improvements as part of the eDP 1.4 specification. But at least for now PSR2 with Tiger Lake laptops doesn't seem to jive with frame-buffer compression.

In any case this change will likely make it into the Linux 5.11 kernel for release early next year.