Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#1

Post by yankcrime » Sat, Mar 15, 2025, 11:20 AM UTC

Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged
gitlab.gnome.org

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#2

Post by rolandog » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 3:54 AM UTC

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.

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#3

Post by purpleidea » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 5:12 AM UTC

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 ???

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#4

Post by jhoechtl » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

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

Does KDE/Plasma offer sthg. comparable?

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#5

Post by hysan » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #4

That sounds like a great visible improvement. Gnome is polished WM. Does KDE/Plasma offer sthg. comparable?

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

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#6

Post by lawik » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

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

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#7

Post by epse » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

purpleidea wrote: post #3

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 ???

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

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#8

Post by mort96 » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 7:43 AM UTC

lawik wrote: post #6

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

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.

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#9

Post by mort96 » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

epse wrote: post #7

purpleidea wrote: post #3

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 ???

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

Speaking of, I don't mind that in principle, but why does it linger so long on the "Success" page? It adds a handful of milliseconds of page loading and 30ms of computation, and an eternity (~seconds) of just an unnecessary delay before even starting to load the site I actually wanna go to, whys that?

Re: Gnome / mutter triple buffering patch merged

#10

Post by konart » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 8:01 AM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #4

That sounds like a great visible improvement. Gnome is polished WM. Does KDE/Plasma offer sthg. comparable?

>comparable

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