New Patches Aim To Improve Smoothness & Latency Of NVIDIA On GNOME

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his prolific contributions to GNOME the past several years particularly in regards to performance has a new merge request open for helping with the "smoothness" of the NVIDIA driver on GNOME Shell.

Stemming from bug reports over non-ideal frame clocks if swap events not supported and NVIDIA on X.Org spending 75% of its time blocked, these are two of the areas Daniel van Vugt has been working to address for GNOME 3.38 / Ubuntu 20.10.

This past week he opened a new merge request to fix NVIDIA smoothness issues under GNOME with the binary driver. This code for Mutter adds heuristically calculated presentation timestamps for improving the smoothness and latency.

Besides the NVIDIA driver, it also may help some virtual machines too where the presentation time was always reported to zero.

Given the changes are small and straight forward, hopefully this merge request will land soon if further testing is a success.