Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh “VRR” functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature.
Going back to GNOME 46 has been experimental Variable Refresh Rate support. Now after two years of behing hidden as an experimental feature, it’s being considered stable with GNOME 50. To use GNOME VRR on current releases has required first running gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features “[‘variable-refresh-rate’]” before the VRR option is presented to GNOME users under the display settings — for those with displays capable of running at a variable refresh rate.
Michel Dänzer authored this merge request to promote VRR out of its experimental status for Mutter. He commented on the merge request:
“With recent improvements, VRR should generally work well on most systems. While there can always be corner cases, in particular with monitors which don’t support VRR well, it’s still disabled by default and needs to be enabled explicitly in display settings. If it doesn’t work well yet on a given system, it should be left disabled for now.
Also fix a couple of minor bugs I noticed while working on this.”
As of this morning that MR is merged to Mutter Git in time for the GNOME/Mutter 50 beta.
There still are some GNOME VRR improvements pending like VRR cursor handling improvements and using the deadline timer with VRR. But even without those merged yet, the VRR support is good enough finally to no longer be treated as an experimental feature in GNOME 50.
This promotion makes GNOME VRR support available by default under the display settings while users will still need to enable the setting if they wish to this dynamic refresh rate capability with their modern hardware.
