Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

[bjoli]

I wonder if this will also fix the problem i have with my mouse cursor only drawing at what seems like 24 fps. It is noticeably laggier than in KDE.

It has something to do with drawing, because over some surfaces it doesn't happen, but all gtk native apps exhibit it. This is a 7900x with an intel a750 graphics card. It should not happen.

[nialv7]

Cursors are generally rendered with a different mechanism than the rest of the screen. What you are describing sounds a lot like a problem with VRR.

[worthless-trash]

As always, you should lodge a bug, there has been some improvements in mouse rendering about 3 months ago iirc, but I don't remember specific details.

[purpleidea]

Sweet! I know this patch has been cooking for a while, gosh the gitlab page takes ages to even load...

Trying to look at the source... Is the whole thing less than ~1000 LOC ???

[epse]

You probably got served an Anubis challenge first, doing some computations to block (LLM) scraper bots, which does slow down loading by a second or so

[lawik]

But can we Gilette this? Quadruple buffering? 24 buffers for the smoothest display?

[mort96]

I believe 3 buffers is the minimum you need for the CPU and GPU to be able to work independently and never wait for each other. Sure, one could queue up a bunch of extra frames and you'd have more margin in case of a multiple frames long stutter (at the cost of a lot of input latency), but you're typically better served avoiding multiple frames long stutters if possible. Triple buffering is, I believe, more about squeezing out all the performance you can from the hardware, not about just queuing up some number of frames which happens to be 3.

[rolandog]

Great news! It's fascinating to read all the effort very dedicated and talented people put into improving the software we love and use.

Kudo's to Daniel van Vugt and all the testers that pitched in time and effort.

[jhoechtl]

That sounds like a great visible improvement. Gnome is polished WM.

Does KDE/Plasma offer sthg. comparable?

[shakna]

KDE rolled that out in June last year [0]

[0] https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.0.90/

[hysan]

IIRC, KDE has had triple buffering for quite a while now. GNOME is playing catchup here.

[konart]

>comparable

KDE is way ahead in (almost) all departments these days.

[mnahkies]

Anyone know if this is too late to make the cut for Fedora 42? (beta was announced this week)

[microtonal]

The changes seem to be in the RC branch from GNOME 48:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/commits/48.rc?ref_ty...

So, unless they are disabled or backed out, seems they might land in Fedora 42?

[bkor]

It was merged Feb 14 2025. It'll be in GNOME 48 and Fedora 42. It's likely already in the Fedora beta branch.

[Jotalea]

I don't fully understand this, but it sounds like a nice optimization.