GNOME's Mutter Lands Fullscreen Unredirect Support For Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 16 April 2020 at 10:18 AM EDT. 32 Comments
GNOME
A big change was just merged today for the in-development GNOME 3.38 that will benefit Wayland gamers and others.

Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl work on Wayland full-screen surface unredirection to bypass compositing when running full-screen games and the like has just been merged into Mutter! Basically avoiding extra compositor work when an application/game is occupying the entire area of the desktop. This full-screen surface unredirection to bypass compositing with Mutter should be a measurable performance help for gamers running the GNOME Wayland session.

The X11 code for GNOME has already supported this full-screen bypass compositing while the Mutter Wayland code finally saw similar treatment today in Git master after the patches had been under review for seven months.

More details within this now honored merge request. Already the the GNOME 3.36 / Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. (X)Wayland session performance for gaming has been quite good while this Wayland functionality helps to address one of the remaining areas in Wayland compositor performance on GNOME.
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