In an ideal world, every frame your application draws would appear on the screen exactly on time. Sadly, as anyone living in the year 2020 CE can attest, this is far from an ideal world. Sometimes the scene gets more complicated and takes longer to draw than you estimated, and sometimes the OS scheduler just decides it has more important things to do than pay attention to you.
When this happens, for some applications, it would be best if you could just get the bits on the screen as fast as possible rather than wait for the next vsync. The Present extension for X11 has a option to let you do exactly this:
If 'options' contains PresentOptionAsync, and the 'target-msc'
is less than or equal to the current msc for 'window', then
the operation will be performed as soon as possible, not
necessarily waiting for the next vertical blank interval.
But you don't use Present directly, usually, usually Present is the mechanism for GLX and Vulkan to put bits on the screen. So, today I merged some code to Mesa to enable the corresponding features in those APIs, namely GLX_EXT_swap_control_tear and VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_RELAXED_KHR. If all goes well these should be included in Mesa 21.0, with a backport to 20.2.x not out of the question. As the GLX extension name suggests, this can introduce some visual tearing when the buffer swap does come in late, but for fullscreen games or VR displays that can be an acceptable tradeoff in exchange for reduced stuttering.
