Mutter Merges Experimental Variable Refresh Rate For GNOME 46

It's happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March.

The merge request backends/native: Add support for variable refresh rate was merged this Saturday morning to Mutter. This follows after obtaining feature, UI, and string feeeze exceptions to be able to land this work. They were able to obtain the freeze exception since in part this feature is gated behind an experimental flag and not enabled by default. Thus the risk is low of regressing existing GNOME desktop users.

Mutter's behavior will remain the same on GNOME 46 unless the user opts in to enabling this experimental feature via:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"

The GNOME Control Center UI support as of writing has yet to be merged but presumably will be landing imminently.

It's great to see this VRR desktop support finally come together in time for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out on 20 March, especially given the number of Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync displays on the market the past several years.