GNOME 3.34's Mutter Gets Important Fix To Avoid Stuttering / Frame Skips

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 23 May 2019 at 05:41 PM EDT. 17 Comments
GNOME
In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor / window manager seeing an important fix recently lowering the output lag under X11 so it matches GNOME's Wayland performance, another important Mutter fix also landed.

The Mutter/Clutter change to avoid skipping over the next frame to render has landed. This is yet another big deal contribution by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt as part of their GNOME desktop enhancements.

Daniel's code contains a reworked algorithm to avoid skipped frames, which were silently skipped over unknown to the user due to accidental triple buffering (closed by the other aforelinked change), the Wayland performance on GNOME generally being pretty fast, and other behavioral characteristics of GNOME that left users and developers not realizing frames were being skipped in rendering.

But now the reworked code is in place and is part of this week's Mutter 3.33.2 development release and what will culminate with being part of the GNOME 3.34 release in September. Daniel considered this issue to be one of the most pressing problems around stuttering in GNOME and should help frame-rate smoothness. He's also evaluating whether this change can be back-ported in the Ubuntu packages for Mutter in current Ubuntu releases.
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