FreeSync di AMD sta arrivando su Linux!

E’ già da molto che NVIDIA ha introdotto G-SYNC, la propria tecnologia per ridurre lo screen tearing (aumentare la durata della batteria ed adattare automaticamente il refresh del display), mentre AMD è rimasta molti passi indietro a riguardo, pur possedendo l’ottima e funzionale FreeSync (adottata da molti produttori di monitor).

Le cose però stanno per cambiare. Tramite questo messaggio, postato su lists.freedesktop, sembra che il driver AMDGPU DAL abbia, sulla lista delle modifiche da effettuare, il supporto a FreeSync di AMD. Possiamo infatti leggere che:

The goal with DAL is to provide a unified, full featured display stack to service all of our Linux offerings. This driver will have to support our full feature set beyond what’s supported by amdgpu, e.g.
– synchronzied timings across different displays
– freesync
– solid support of 6 displays in any configuration (HDMI, DVI, DP, DP MST, etc)
– solid support of 4k at 60 timings on APUs
– power features, such as
– clock-accurate bandwidth formulas
– improved interaction with powerplay to maximize power savings
– Improved audio and other infoframe related features
– Improved stability with powerplay since display hw is involved in the SMC hw interactions and improper programming sequences can lead to GPU hangs, etc.

The current amdgpu display stack grew somewhat organically and as such is not well suited to handling all of the hardware dependencies involved especially in areas like audio. The drm abstractions used by the old code map less and less well to new hw pipelines. Atomic helps, but if we are going to convert, it seemed like a good time to start fresh.