Hi All. After watching Bryan Lunduke with the System76 guys I decided to install their Pop OS on my desktop. I have a reasonable background in linux, have been running debian-based distros for a few years.
What I don’t have any experience with is drivers, so I’m asking you guys here for a bit of help.
Issue description copied from my thread at /r/pop_os. Issue presents both in Pop (Intel/AMD graphics version) and linux mint cinnamon.
1: The Displayport-based audio is also almost an octave too low and slow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zk2nxHAv_g) , and switching to Displayport audio will cause browser playback (eg youtube) to go slower. VERY interesting bug. The audio playback doesn’t start until ~2 seconds of video playback, but audio and video stay in sync.
2: During fullscreen video playback there is enough screen tearing and dropped frames to give me significant motion sickness. Maybe it’s because my GPU is so old, but I know it is fully capable of pushing the required frames (performs admirably in Windows. Easy games like LoL, D3 and Starcraft get 60fps at 4k easily, while supporting video playback on 1440p monitor concurrently.)
I’m digging into installation of AMD proprietary drivers, but I’m quite lost. I have absolutely no idea if that will help, or even if they’re already installed by default. I’m almost tempted to think it’s a setting somewhere that is causing a low sampling rate or something.
Specs:
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 windforce
Monitors:
2560X1440 (Portrait mode)
3840X2160 (Landscape mode)
both monitors connected via DisplayPort
MSI x99 sli plus
Intel i7 5820k
32GB RAM
Thankyou So much.
Andrew.
P.S. I hope I provided enough info, I did watch that video on how to ask for help.
Only just recently has any of this been getting worked on. I’m surprised you get GPU audio at all. Get a sound card.
Install compiz. Otherwise look at the Archwiki page for AMDGPU or whatever your GPU is if you have an intel chip or ATI, idk.
Don’t bother. AMDGPU is built in and is already good. The need for AMDGPU-PRO would be for if you were doing significant workloads, neural network stuff, or you have a radeon pro duo. Otherwise you are golden with just the AMDGPU drivers. If your GPU is not supported, then I highly recommend installing the mesa packages to your system and rolling that up to date with the radeon driver and you should be golden on there.
You can still use HD7xxx cards with the proprietary driver, but honestly, I don’t know why you would. The latest open source code will give you everything you need for that card up to OpenGL4.5 with radeonsi. According to the radeon feature matrix, the card does not use amdgpu, but just radeon instead, which is no biggy. The amdgpu driver is just the 2D kernel module, the 3D stuff is handled by radeonsi, which is used for all card HD7xxx and up.
Last card I had before my current Polaris was a HD7850 (just upgraded less than a year ago). That Pitcairn card ran everything with the open source drivers, no problem.
OpenCL is the only thing you won’t have access to.
As for the screen tearing, you need a desktop compositor for the drivers’ vsync to kick in. If on Gnome or KDE, just turning on their own compositors will do the trick.
Now for the audio part, can’t help you there. Never tried DP audio. Are you using PA, pure ALSA?
Thanks for your help. I mostly? understand what you’re saying.
I have no idea what a compositor is, but most of my google searches seem to indicate they are enabled by default. I will do a bit more digging. Something is definitely strange
Does that mean there’s nothing I have to change? Do I have to install, or set the kernel drive to radeon instead of amdgpu? I have no idea even how to check < Reading about this in the archwiki. Will check back in later.
A desktop compositor is basically the 3D effects. Most DEs have options to toggle it on/off in their respective configuration panels. Usually it’s on by default if it detects your video card has working 3D acceleration (true for Gnome and KDE anyway). This will make use of 3D Vsync, which should eliminate screen tearing.
And to the second question, depends on the distro. Pure Debian, for example, does not enable 3D acceleration on AMD/ATI cards by default due to their core politics (non-free firmware) and you have to take a few extra steps to enable it. Most other popular distros, like Ubuntu and its derivatives, do have it on from the moment you pop in the LiveCD/USB. I think Arch does too (depending on how you configure it on install), and since that is a rolling release distro, you will often be running the latest stable code. So no need to worry about graphics drivers, unless you want to be running bleeding edge stuff (basically beta drivers). For an “old” card like yours, you should be more than fine with running with whatever Arch provides and making sure to keep the OS updated.
Well, Pop is an Ubuntu derivative ‘designed for the best desktop experience’ using gnome 3 . I can’t imagine why it would have the compositor off by default, yet the screen tearing persists.
Can you give me a hand figuring out how switch between ‘radeon’ and ‘amdgpu’ on Ubuntu, so I can see if that’s where the problem is coming from?
Maybe they configured the driver with Vsync off? Run glxinfo from the terminal to check if you have hardware acceleration, and glxgears to see if Vsync is on. The fps in glxgears will be capped at your monitors’ refresh rate if Vsync is working.
The card is a Tahiti, so it does not work with amdgpu. If you want to use the proprietary driver instead, Ubuntu has their driver installer gui thing that you can use. A assume Pop has it too (unless it comes with its own utility).
Tearing is either very minimal or nonexistent in the movement of windows. But it doesn’t only happen in browsers, it also happens in VLC media player, and on resizing some windows. Mint seems to be almost good enough. I haven’t retried pop yet, I’ll swap drives and give it a shot this evening.
Other info:
from glxinfo direct rendering: Yes
from glxgears: No tearing in that window, but tearing in other windows persists while gears are running.
FPS seems capped at 60.140
I found the setting to turn compositing on and off. It’s on.
It appears AMDGPU has beta support for my card. Maybe that is what’s running?
Edit:
lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display’
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Tahiti PRO [Radeon HD 7950/8950 OEM / R9 280]
Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Tahiti PRO [Radeon HD 7950/8950 OEM / R9 280]
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu
Is there a full pipeline composition option? That may just be an nVidia thing…
You might look into disabling the Mint compositor and running Compton. The base config is pretty easy, I’ve used it with i3wm and XFCE. You can put it in your startup. It’s usually compton --config ~/.config/compton.conf -b
The ~/.config/compton.conf file is going to be where you’ll make your edits to the syncing options.
You could also try adding a configuration file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
That directory should also have a 00-keyboard.conf file in it.
If you make a file called 20-radeon.conf in there and add.
You would want a live cd/usb incase it didn’t play nicely with something else that is installed like the compositor.
If it doesn’t work you just have to delete the 20-radeon.conf file that you make.
I left out other options in that because I don’t know if that card supports them. good resource for the rest of what you could do… https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Performance_tuning
Also if you end up using the amdgpu driver it’s pretty much the same thing only the file would be named 20-amdgpu.conf and these two change.
AFAIK the composition pipeline is an NVIDIA only option.
Closest thing I can think of to achieving this on AMD is that you can turn vsync on if you’re using Kwin through the compositor settings program inside KDE Plasma 5, but obviously that is very limiting.
I’d love to try that option @sycpuppy, but that directory doesn’t exist, and there isn’t a 00-keyboard.conf file on my linux mint system anywhere.
within /etc/X11/ there is:
app-defaults default-display-manager fonts rgb.txt xinit xkb Xreset Xreset.d Xresources Xsession Xsession.d Xsession.options xsm
I’d like to make sure to note that screen tearing also happens when scrolling down in a static webpage, like Wikipedia, and occasionally in the forums here.
Also, you can just create a xorg.conf file inside /etc/X11/ if it’s not there, and simply add the relevant section. This makes it a system wide change. You could try that. If your X fails upon next reboot, simply remove the created file.