GNOME Shell 42 to have better mouse input that will help gaming

The GNOME team has announced that with GNOME Shell 42 that will release in 2022, things are going to get better for mouse input which is a nice win for gamers.

Starting with a brief background they said "Traditionally, GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so its handling is synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, this means applications would typically see approximately 60 events per second (or 144 if you follow the trends).". Not a shortcut the team say, as it was needed to know where to send you input, something apparently expensive on resources and so " it made sense to do with the lowest frequency possible".

Many applications want it different like drawing apps using a brush and "velocity/direction/acceleration calculations" plus games "that render more often than the frame rate (e.g. games with vsync off)".

What's different now then? Well, input events are now sent at the actual device rate which has a huge amount of variation between cheap devices, laptop touchpads, tablets and high-end gaming mice. The result for gamers, they say, should result in "less janky" input.

Something that took a long time to fully implement, which the GNOME team said was due to inputs ending up getting queued up if an application is not reading events in time. Eventually the queue would run out of space and the compositor would shut things down. The fix added works around this but they say it's still temporary with a better solution being proposed for Wayland.

For gamers, artists and anyone else who wants seriously precise inputs - this is a nice win for those using Wayland. It should result in lower input latency, and we don't have to tell you why that's great. Looks like 2022 is going to be good for Linux gamers using GNOME and Wayland.

See more in their blog post.