Speaker
Description
Smooth animation of graphics requires that the presentation timing of
each frame be controlled accurately by the application so that the
contents can be correctly adjusted for the display time. Controlling
the presentation timing involves predicting when rendering of the
frame will be complete and using the display API to request that the
frame be displayed at a specific time.
Predicting the time it will take to render a frame usually draws upon
historical frame rendering times along with application
heuristics. Once drawn, the display API is given the job of presenting
the content to the user at the specified time. A failure of either of
these two mechanisms will result in content being delayed, and a
stuttering or judder artifact made visible to the user.
Historical timing information includes both the time taken to render a
frame with the GPU along with the actual time each frame was displayed
to the user. Ideally, the application will also be given some estimate
of how long it will take to ready the frame for display once the
presentation request has been delivered to the display system. With
these three pieces of information (application GPU time, actual
display time, presentation overhead), the application can estimate
when its next frame will be ready for display.
The following work is underway to provide applications this
information and to improve the accuracy of display presentation timing
in the Linux environment.
-
Vulkan GOOGLE_display_timing extension implementation in
Mesa. This offers applications some fairly straightforward
measurements that can help predict when a frame timing target
might be missed. -
Heuristics in the X Composite and Present extension
implementations to improve accuracy of reported display times to
Present-using applications -
Additions to Composite that replace the above heuristics with
precise timing information for Compositing managers modified to
support these additions. -
Semi-automatic compositing support added to the Composite
extension which allow in-server compositing of some windows to
reduce variability in the display process.
This presentation will describe the above work and demonstrate the
benefits of the resulting code.
| Code of Conduct | Yes |
|---|---|
| GSoC, EVoC or Outreachy | No |
