GNOME 3.38 - Xorg: 144Hz won't work with multiple monitors on AMD

it does 120 hz, the vizio recognizes it, it will also run at 60 hz.

max on the vizio is 120 at 1080, 60 at 4k

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Sorry thatā€™s not what I meant. The input signal of the monitor is definitely 120Hz thatā€™s true. But I even with that being set the animations can still run at 60Hz. The frames will then be doubled, so that each frame is presented on 2 refreshes. This will give you the ā€œ120Hzā€ output youā€™re most likely seeing. I hope that makes it a little bit clearer.

Iā€™m not sure if thatā€™s accurate because I can have one monitor set at 24hz, one at 52 and one at 60.

This is how the system originally launched until I changed it. You can absolutely see the difference, but only in a couple of games, in particular CSGO and Doom 2016.

Iā€™ve gotten this working before with a couple desktop environments but never with an AMD card as I dont use them. As I understand it, this is a limitation of compositors, and not X. I believe there was an update to mutter to make this possible but I havent checked in a while. I dont use gnome.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Multi-Monitor-Vary-Hz

My litmus test for this was checking the test UFO on the main 144hz monitor.

This will only work of course if youā€™re using a browser that can manage such a feat. I stuck with chrome and chrome accessories for that.

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If you play a game fullscreen, this would bypass the compositor allowing full refresh. The main issue is when not gaming the higher refresh monitor will only display a lower refresh despite being set much higher.

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Shadow holder had already mentioned this: GNOME 3.38 - Xorg: 144Hz won't work with multiple monitors on AMD

I have gotten this working correctly on X before. It should be possible.

Unless the nvidia driver is doing some black magic to make it possible.

I def see this. If I run a game as not fullscreen it tends to tear and ā€˜feelsā€™ slower.

My point was that you can have multiple refresh settings on different screens with an AMD card.

I know that if I have one at 24, one at 52 and one at 60, the one at 24 looks terrible.

Yeah, Iā€™m not sold on this being an X issue or an AMD issue. I have a hard time believing nvidia is capable of this and AMD is not but I dont have any way to prove it.

It could be some NV black magic. Remember that they supported multiple screens at different resolutions before xRandr became a thing. And then when xRandr became the default, the NV stuff broke.

not saying that X and AMD (and Intel) are not capable of doing it, but that NVā€™s user space has a lot of secret sauce.

Sorry I havenā€™t replied to this in a while Iā€™ve been busy with other things. As far as the different refresh rates issue goes it seems this problem does also occur on NVIDIA but there are fixes when using environmental variables and NVIDIA settings app. Sadly no such fixes are available for AMD so I have resorted to using Wayland which is mostly fine with just a few small annoyances.

Regarding the mouse freezing/USB issue I mentioned earlier Iā€™m now fairly certain that itā€™s actually a problem related to newer kernel versions. I figured this out by running a series of mkinitcpio commands on different kernel versions newer linux and linux-zen kernels warned about missing xhci_pci modules while the older linux-lts kernel did not display any such warning. Iā€™ve linked the results of these commands here. On top of this I donā€™t believe I have actually ever experienced this issue on linux-lts as at the time I thought it was a Wayland issue and switched my kernel to linux-zen. I also never used to have this issue on older arch installs. Sadly I cannot test this theory in the real world right now as before I realized this I made an oopsie and accidentally wiped my SSD and installed Pop_OS instead of Arch. Next time I reinstall I will reply back with the results.

However even if my theory is correct it is still not an ideal solution because:

  1. I want a newer kernel with fsync patches provided by linux-zen
  2. At some point when the linux-lts kernel gets updated enough the same issue that caused this in newer version is bound to crop up in LTS as well

I would be grateful if somebody could suggest a more permanent fix. My motherboard is an MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 installed using the AM4 chipset. Most of the ports on the back of the computer are also USB 3.1.

Also I will probably start a separate thread for this issue soon as it is off topic from the original issue.

Do you have legacy USB mode turned on in your BIOS? I had this issue on AM3+ and the solution was to turn that off in BIOS and ensure that UNPN aware OS was turned on.

Thanks I will try turning that off. Slightly annoying because I will have to turn it back on if I want to boot from a USB but a small price to pay if it fixes the issue :grinning:

Edit: What is UNPN aware OS?

Universal plug and play.

Also, if you turn off legacy USB support, you should still be fine. The legacy is a hardware work around for some hardware and some MS Windows drivers. the XHCI and UHCI USB interfaces/protocols should handle the legacy devices fine.

Ah okay my bios doesnā€™t have an option f unpn but its almost certainly on by default. I have not had anymore issues since turning off legacy usb but its an intermittent problem so Iā€™ll have to wait and see :slight_smile:

Good luck. I hope you see no more hick-ups.

Thanks me too. Another interesting thing a found while testing in a arch vm is that installing the upd72020x-fw package fixed the xhci_pci warning even though I donā€™t believe I have a Renesas USB card unless itā€™s integrated into the motherboard.

Damn I just got another freeze in Pop_OS. I might back up this installation and try to install arch with the upd72020x-fw package and see how that goes

Iā€™m marking this as solved now as I doubt anything more can be contributed to the original topic. I will probably start a second thread for the USB issue. Thanks for everybodyā€™s help :slight_smile:

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This is a very important issue for myself also. Although not sure at this point what would be the best solution! Got an NVIDIA gpu.