Does composition render double-buffering useless?

[Felix Bellaby]

Torgeir Veimo wrote:
> > Compositors normally exhaust their event queues before they begin
> > drawing a new frame. You could code a compositor to wait for a while
> > between frames to reduce their load on the system. However, the
> > resulting display might appear irratic due to the enforced delays
> > between the application and the user.
> 
> What about adding the possibility to obtain a heartbeat counter, so that 
> an application can sync it's buffering to the compositor / screen-refresh?

One might ask why the X server does not include a heartbeat counter
already so that applications can sync their buffer swaps to the video
refresh. Just think of all the time that glxgears wastes ...

I am sure that the costs of synchronising the applications would far
exceed any possible benefits. 

Felix