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.…