VRR, Lower Latency Likely Coming For KDE's KWin Wayland Compositor

Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has work-in-progress code striving for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR, a.k.a. Adaptive-Sync / FreeSync) support for the KWin Wayland compositor. Additionally, the tentative patches also aim to get the compositor-induced latency down to around ~1-2ms when using direct scanout with Vsync but without VRR.

This Variable Refresh Rate support for KDE on Wayland is quite significant for Linux gamers and another step in making KDE's Wayland support at parity to the X11 support. As well as with the optimized latency support also being of help. But for now it's important to keep in mind this support is still work-in-progress -- the developer hasn't yet even been able to test/verify the functionality with a FreeSync display.

The code for now can be found via this merge request but with some luck could end up in Plasma 5.22 later this year.

Sway has also been among the compositors support VRR on Wayland.