Earlier today, Daniel Colascione merged his double-buffering Emacs display patch, and I was interested in seeing whether it reduced flickering when viewing animated GIFs on my problematic main machine.
And it sure does:
First you see an Emacs from five hours ago displaying a GIF, and it is flicker-o-rama. Then I switch to a brand new Emacs with Daniel’s patch, and it is completely flicker-free.
Now, that the flicker was there in the first place is probably due to me not bothering to figure out what settings the Nvidia driver needs to … work better: On my laptop, there was no flickering even without Daniel’s fix. So your mileage will vary, but it’s obviosly a major step forward, flicker wise, on some machines. Thanks, Daniel.