Experimental VRR Support Might Still Land For GNOME 46

The long in-development work for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support plumbed into GNOME's Mutter compositor might still make it for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out this month. It's still being treated as an experimental feature at this point but a feature freeze exception is being sought to allow its inclusion this release rather than waiting for GNOME 47 in the autumn.

We've been eager to see if Mutter's VRR support would make it for GNOME 46 or be delayed another release cycle. The exciting news though is that freeze exceptions are being pursued to still allow the Mutter code to land as well as the UI support within the GNOME Control Center.

The GNOME Control Center merge request and Mutter merge request have been active in recent days re-basing against the latest upstream code for GNOME 46, getting the necessary code review, and now awaiting action on the freeze exceptions.

In the initial form this VRR support for GNOME is considered experimental and will first require running gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']" for enabling the experimental feature support. So since it won't be widely advertised for GNOME 46, it will hopefully make it still ahead of the GNOME 46.0 release due out on 20 March... Stay tuned!

UPDATE: VRR is merged for GNOME 46!