Ancient X11 scaling technology

I used to see it all the time on X11. I'd see it on YouTube/Firefox. I'd see it on VLC. I'd see it on MPV. Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day. The Intel driver luckily had an xorg.conf setting I could add to make this less of an issue -- I guess it'd turn on some internal Intel driver logic to skip frames or something else if it wasn't able to draw the entire video frame in time for display. However as soon as Debian made Wayland the default this issue 100% disappared and I no longer needed to edit a conf file to make my display work correctly. This is hands-down the singular reason I love Wayland. It just works without any faffing around as Windows, MacOS, etc has done since the mid 1990's. Wayland has achieved more in 5 years than X11 has done in the last 25 years.

So basically what you are saying is that they could have changed a default in a config file somewhere, 5 minutes of work, but instead they decided to spend hundreds (thousands?) of person-years building something new from scratch? And that's a good thing? Oof.

I assume there's a reason Intel didn't make that particular setting the default in their x11 drivers. While it certainly fixed the screen tearing issue, I presume there was some tradeoff which made some other feature worse off. Wayland however I assume is already built so it doesn't need the driver to implement some workaround to fix it, it's already designed to correctly handle video output by ensuring only the full frame is rendered every single frame.

> To summarise, the downsides are that it requires more memory, and that it reduces throughput and adds latency (except when there’s already a compositor or a vblank-synced fullscreen display).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/518362/whats-the-do...

I think the extra requirements aren't a problem on modern cards. However on lower end devices e.g. the older intel iGPUs, I could see this becoming an issue.

> Wayland however I assume is already built so it doesn't need the driver to implement some workaround to fix it...

My money is on Wayland enabling the equivalent of this setting by default.

> I presume there was some tradeoff which...

Did you notice any problems after enabling the setting? If you didn't notice any problems, then why would you care about any hypothetical tradeoffs?

> Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day.

What hardware are you running on?

Among the many systems I have, I have a laptop running an Intel 945GM [0]. I don't see the behavior you're reporting even if I have it hooked up [1] to a 1080p external display. On that system, I have zero Xorg config files... it's all default settings.

I also don't see the behavior you report on any of my much more powerful systems.

[0] Integrated graphics chip released somewhere around 2006

[1] Via VGA cable!

> It just works without any faffing around as Windows, MacOS, etc has done since the mid 1990's.

Unless you like your applications to save your window positions. I like Firefox to be on my left monitor, and if I use Wayland I have to manually drag it there every time I start it, because Wayland, in the year 2025, still lacks this basic feature that Windows, macOS, and X11 have had for like 40 years now.

(unless I use XWayland, which magically returns all of the missing functionality, though with a tendency to break other things)

Maybe Wayland works without any faffing around for you, but the last time I ran it(via KDE), it completely hung my system whereas X11 worked out of the box.

And Wayland has been around for at least 15 years, btw, not 5. You'd think 15 years would be long enough to get something stable, but apparently not.

Isn't positioning windows a window manager problem? I can't see how that is an X11 vs Wayland issue except that the window managers you are using are different.