It’s still not looking like triple buffering will land for GNOME 48 with the feature freeze set for next weekend. But that Mutter dynamic triple buffering support has been improved upon and now at least is working for direct scan-out situations as well as variable rate refresh (VRR).
Ubuntu desktop engineer Daniel van Vugt with Canonical who has been leading the years-long GNOME triple buffering effort has been updating the patches again more recently. Over the past week he’s made more fixes to the triple buffering code to improve its state overall. Most exciting though is what he shared in his latest status update:
“Finally unified the flipping/posting code paths of direct scanout and composite rendering so all frames are handled the same. Triple buffering during direct scanout is now supported and the two features no longer inhibit each other. This also means VRR (still experimental in Mutter) no longer inhibits triple buffering.”
Direct scan-out such as for full-screen gaming/videos and other purposes can now work in the presence of triple buffering. VRR for variable rate refresh during gaming is also important.
Daniel also noted he’s down to three unresolved discussion items with the triple buffering code, down from 10 in the last week.
So the triple buffering code for GNOME continues to be improved upon, but with the GNOME 48 feature freeze in days it’s looking less and less likely that it will be merged this cycle. In any event Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions among others continue to carry these patches for enhancing the GNOME desktop experience on lower-end hardware.
