Mesa 19.1 Likely To See Radeon "RADV" Vulkan FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync Support

Mesa 19.1 is now even more exciting as RADV's co-lead, Bas Nieuwenhuizen has requested the Radeon Vulkan's FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support be a blocker bug for this quarterly Mesa update.

As explained last week, RADV's FreeSync support has been held up by lacking a configuration system to selectively enable the functionality when not dealing with any compositor, multimedia program, or other applications where this variable rate refresh technology could interfere and to only enable FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync for full-screen games. That's been the blocker while a patch has been available for flipping on VRR for RADV.

Fortunately, Bas in the past few days has been working on RADV support for DriConf so that this configuration infrastructure could be re-used by RADV. This would allow the application white/black-listing functionality to be used by the Vulkan driver for adequate toggling of VRR.

After getting the DriConf working for RADV, he has the support pending for toggling the adaptive sync support and enabling it by default.

As of writing, the code hasn't yet been merged into Mesa Git but he has marked it as being a blocker bug for Mesa 19.1. The expected branching and initial release candidate of Mesa 19.1 is expected at the end of April while the official Mesa 19.1.0 release should be here by the end of May. Thus with Mesa 19.1 paired with Linux 5.0+ would yield working FreeSync for Linux gaming with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.