A one year old merge request to support Wayland's Tearing Control protocol (tearing-control-v1) has finally been merged into the Sway compositor codebase.

This new ability for Sway allows for optionally enabling tearing on a per-output basis. There is also the ability with Sway to force enable/disable tearing for a specific application(s) based on window rules. This tearing support only works for full-screen applications.

While Wayland started out with the emphasis that every frame is rendered perfect, the [1]tearing control protocol ultimately came about for those not caring about every frame being rendered perfectly but wanting to achieve maximum performance. XWayland and other compositors have already added tearing control protocol support. Since last year [2]wlroots has supported it too for that Wayland library used by Sway and others.

More details on Sway's tearing control support can be found via [3]this merge request that has finally worked its way into the Sway compositor codebase.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/tearing%20control

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/wlroots-Tearing-Control-Merged

[3] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7598