AMD Posts Updated Mesa Patches For Variable Refresh Rate (FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync)

Earlier this month AMD finally got back on track with issuing new patches for FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / HDMI Variable Refresh Rate support now that there seems to be a consensus among the Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver developers over what this API should look like so it can support the multiple technologies and drivers at play.

See the aforelinked article for more details, but this FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync/VRR support has been a long time coming for the open-source Radeon driver stack. The tech is intended to help reduce stuttering, tearing, and/or input lag while gaming.

We haven't seen any of the DRM patches queued yet in DRM-Next for the next Linux kernel cycle, so it might not make it for Linux 4.20~5.0, but at least it looks like it will be here soon. On user-space side, AMD developers today posted their second version of these patches.

These patches add in the Mesa infrastructure work for interfacing with the new DRM VRR properties and an option for allowing Adaptive-Sync to be enabled from the Mesa DRIRC configuration file handling. At this stage it's just catering towards the RadeonSI driver with Intel not yet supporting this technology on their hardware and NVIDIA going their own route (G-SYNC) and we haven't seen any attempts by Nouveau to support these bits.

These updated patches fix program name detection for Wine applications, important for these days of Wine gaming and Steam Play / Proton. There are also more applications blacklisted to avoid unexpected behavior and other code improvements.

These Mesa patches can be found on the Mesa mailing list but as is standard development practices, don't look for these patches to be merged until the new DRM properties code enters the Linux mainline Git tree.