GNOME’s Mutter compositor has merged a fix that stops needless GPU rendering while a monitor is asleep in power-saving mode. The 17-patch set was merged on October 19, 2026, Phoronix reported, and should ship in GNOME 51.2.

The work traces to a bug report filed about a month earlier against GNOME 51, which described high GPU usage while the monitor was sleeping because applications kept rendering. Developers traced it to un-throttled repainting of the stage views for the display’s CRTCs, which continued even in the power-saving state.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat wrote the fix in Mutter merge request 5363. With it, Mutter’s renderer holds off painting when power saving is on and a stage view targets a CRTC. “This solves the originally reported bug; vkgears, glxgears, es2gears all report ~60 fps while power saving, without having the frame clock having to deal with knowing about power saving,” Ådahl wrote.

The patches also handle presentation feedback for frames that get thrown away, so a client such as vkgears now receives “discarded” events while power saving.

Phoronix did not report power-draw measurements for the change. The fix is expected to reach users with the GNOME 51.2 point release.