I'very been fooling around in various distros for awhile and while I enjoy the experience, there is one issue I still can't resolve.
Every time I install the proprietary AMD drivers for my R9 280x, I get screen tearing in the OS. So I go and enable tear-free desktop in Catalyst Result : tearing is gone but movin windows, scrolling and so on becomes jittery, choppy and overall very unpleasant.
I don't get this behavior with the open source drivers and I do want to game from time to time and the open source drivers just aren't cutting it.
Do you guys have any solution for this particular issue? I'm looking for proprietary drivers that don't cause tearing and still keep a nice s.oothness in the OS.
The solution is to sell your AMD card and get something from Nvidia unfortunately.
The AMD drivers are utter crap. You could wait around for the kernel drivers, but that could be a while.
In all honesty I'd probably stick with the open source drivers, they're only slightly behind in performance now and will probably overtake the official drivers by next year at the rate they've been improving.
I'm hoping AMD pull their finger out though as SteamOS is supposed to be released this fall.
Yeah, I am hoping that the kernel drivers will be out by then.
Is it possible to game on the open source drivers? STEAM won't even launch without proprietary drivers.
I don't know what Distro you are using, nor the Composer, nor the Window Manager.
Vitaly important information.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI (open-source driver)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMD_Catalyst#30_FPS_.2F_Tear-Free_.2F_V-Sync_bug <-- your issue
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I've tried there distros over the past couple of months :
Ubuntu 12.04 up to 15.04
Opensuse 13.2
Mint 17.1
Kubuntu 15.04
Ubuntu Gnome 15.04
Elementary
I'm not sure if all of them use compiz though. Pretty sure the Ubuntu based ones are. I'll try your fix and report back .
Thanks.
Ubuntu GNOME does not use Compiz.
Easy fix you could try (something I always do on any Linux distro), is:
add this line(s) to /etc/environment
CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
Additionally, you can add VBLANK line under the first one for Vertical Synchronization:
CLUTTER_VBLANK=true (or CLUTTER_VBLANK=none if you don't want V-SYNC)
This, on my AMD GPU makes everything silky smooth, I do not use V-SYNC (add line to CLUTTER_VBLANK=none, but on 60Hz you would probably want to use it, however, Tear-Free add it for desktop, so this line should be unnecessary).