No Surprise But Intel Linux Developers Are Working Towards Adaptive-Sync Support

Back during the Intel Architecture Day event in December, Intel confirmed that finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics there is Adaptive-Sync support after talking about it for several years. While they didn't explicitly mention Linux support, they've been largely spot on for years with supporting new display features on Linux and this should be the case as well with Adaptive-Sync and their next-generation graphics.

Intel's Linux open-source graphics driver stack is nearly at parity to their Windows graphics driver, sans pieces like lacking a nice GUI control panel for Linux and other mostly small bits. So moving forward, especially with how much time already the Intel open-source developers have been working on the Icelake support, it shouldn't be a surprise that they intend to work out Adaptive-Sync support. But it's refreshing to hear that it is happening.

The latest indication of that was a mailing list post by an Intel developer commenting on one of the AMD Linux patches, "Yeah I expect we'll need to do something similar for intel vrr. That's why I'm in this discussion." VRR, of course, being Variable Rate Refresh -- HDMI VRR / DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync.

Part of why it took AMD so long to mainline their FreeSync/VRR open-source Direct Rendering Manager support until now with the Linux 5.0 kernel cycle was for seeing that the core DRM/RandR properties they were adding would be suitable for other upstream drivers to support, Intel included.

While there has been a lot of Intel Icelake Linux driver code published already, as of yet we haven't seen any actual Intel Linux patches providing support for this feature to reduce/eliminate stuttering and tearing. Hopefully we'll see that in the months ahead with Icelake processors not expected until later in the year.