berkgercek
commented
2 months ago I will follow this up by saying I'm definitely a systems amateur. It could be I missed some deep config to change for X11/Wayland that would alleviate the issue. Having an easier, native solution for this however would give POP! and Cosmic a big leg up in the academic world regardless in my opinion.
A known issue I have with Wayland and X11 is the handling of two displays of disparate refresh rates:
If I have two displays on Wayland/X11, one at 240Hz (A) and another at 60 Hz (B), attached to my machine then the lower rate display (B) always seems to govern the final practical refresh rate output by the OS in other display (A). This happens regardless of which display I set as the primary for GNOME, and regardless of whether I use Nvidia or Noveau drivers on the backend.
I've confirmed the above not through the reported display information but using a photodiode attached to the display directly. It might be that the faster display is getting a 240Hz signal, but in practice the content is only being redrawn at 60Hz.
My use case is for research psychology, psychophysics, and neuroscience where these refresh rates matter greatly for certain types of visual stimuli (especially frequency-tagged stimuli which can make the brain fire at roughly the same frequency). In these tasks it's common to have one display, often in e.g. the MRI room or MEG room, that is expensive and capable of high refresh rates while another much cheaper display is in the control room to monitor the task.
which brings me to my question: How does cosmic handle display compositing and splitting?
Does cosmic-comp work how I understand other compositors to work, refreshing at the lowest rate and sending the display signal at whatever you choose for the output? Or does it treat the displays independently?