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Tl;dr: X bad and tears but Wayland with 1.5 frame latency (or more) good. Now, if you have a monitor (or TV) with 30i refresh rate, you're screwed.

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We don't even know if it's actually a 1.5 frame latency for real because the test didn't try to establish that. The author said it looked like it was 1.5 frames, but that could be a coincidence. It just looks like a 1.5 frame overhead. It could, in reality, be a constant time overhead rather than a function of frames and so would be fine with a lower frame rate.

Tearing would affect everyone that uses a computer with X11 but your proposed example of a TV with 30i refresh rate would only affect the tiny subset of users that use a CRT television as a monitor, right?

I don't think there was ever a 30i screen. GP probably meant 60 interlaced, which needs two full scans for a change, so an effective 30 full frames per second, but enough for 60 half images. For a Wayland compositor and the entire hardware stack would treat it as 30hz only if it really wanted to avoid interlace artifacts, but I don't recall that being a configuration that existed in my lifetime.

1.5 is the worse case, and implementation specific

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