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Ancient X11 scaling technology

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283 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.283s | source
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rwmj ◴[24 Jun 25 21:13 UTC] No.44371126[source]▶
It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.
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kiwijamo ◴[25 Jun 25 03:26 UTC] No.44373399[source]▶
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.
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1. kelnos ◴[25 Jun 25 03:57 UTC] No.44373514[source]▶
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.
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2. kiwijamo ◴[25 Jun 25 04:58 UTC] No.44373749[source]▶
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.
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3. LionEgo ◴[25 Jun 25 08:57 UTC] No.44375066[source]▶
> 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.

4. simoncion ◴[25 Jun 25 09:31 UTC] No.44375285[source]▶
> 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?