Xorg Should Die

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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1

This screen tearing cuts more than the judgement I feel when asking potential romantic interests if they "have any plans this weekend?" Vsync is non-existant on X Window Manager and Wayland is taking his sweet ole time stopping to smell ALL the roses.

I am experiencing this on Fedora 22 Gnome 3.16.4 with X11 defaults running on an AMD 7870.

Appending the Clutter parameters below to /etc/environment solves nothing.

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True

I like Gnome and want to solve this problem without changing desktop environments. Does changing window managers from X Window to something like Awesome solve any vertical tearing issues or am I just f*cked?

2

I'm not sure why you would be using the default xorg WM. Thats a little silly. I don't even think anyone works on it anymore.

Awesome might fix some of the issues you have but I would also look around to see if anyone else has these issues.

3

While you can get VSYNC running decent for desktop apps (sometimes it just don't wanna enable even with tear-free mode), you most definitely NEVER want to enable any sort of vsync for games, the overhead for vsync is MASSIVE for OpenGL which makes it only viable for desktop or 2d usage.

Try Warthunder with and without vsync, talk about disappointing support. The situation isn't much better (or is worse) for Nvidia cards. Linux really needs 3d apps to have vsync and freesync (and gsync?) without MASSIVE overheads!

4

Well hopefully fedora 23 will solve a lot of these issues for you.

If not then wait for kernel 4.3.1 and update the kernel.

HOPEFULLY the AMD GPU drivers will alleviate screen tearing.

5

I don't think the AMDGPU drivers will be anywhere near workable for 290-390 cards until Kernel 4.4. I will wait until its double confirmed before trying. Then again they are open-source drivers so I don't expect them to actually be useful until next year sometime when later OpenGL version are supported.

6

Ive seen people have luck with Kwin (KDE) and different compositors. But yea Xorg is a a bit long in the tooth. The issue is resolvable with your compositor though so look into that. Gnome uses mutter I believe.

7

Yup, I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm just going to use the buggy 'Gnome on Wayland' option until I can find a better compositor that plays nicely with Gnome.

8

Try compton.

9

After upgrading to Ubuntu 15.10 i experienced awful looking tearing on the window borders when moving windows. But after installing gnome-session-wayland it works like charm. No tearing its fast and reliable for 6 days now.