[Solved] Screen tearing with RX550, 'amdgpu' open source driver, Mint 18.3

[EmphaticItalic]

Hi everyone,

Previously I posted about tearing on Mint 17.3 Cinnamon. I managed to solve this by being sure to use the fglrx driver from AMD. This was never 100% perfect for the making use of the video card's capabilities, but the tearing stopped

I upgraded most of my computer last Christmas, decided to move on from 17.3 with the new upgrade, and since moving to a Radeon RX 550, I am experiencing terrible tearing when scrolling in the any web browser. A "distorted line" appears when I scroll in web pages. It is worse if I'm scrolling quickly and page graphics are complex.

To add to that, I get some similar tearing artefacts when watching videos fairly often.

I don't recall this happening on my previous video card on Mint 18.3 (yes sorry I was using 18.3 for a month or so before Christmas) - a Radeon HD 6870 on Mint 18.3 - but I can't simply put the old card back in. The new case I have is quite small and I trashed the old case. Of course you could say why didn't I just keep the old card and case - well I figured it was getting pretty tired after many years, and time to move on to next generation technology.

This same tearing is happening in Cinnamon and Xfce too. Incidentally I also get the same tearing in Manjaro Linux (infamous for it's cutting edge driver support that it is, but the tearing is happening here too). In Manjaro the video runs much nicer but the browsing problem is still there.

I tried the solution found in a forum post about tearing with RX550 and amdgpu at viewtopic.php?f=49&t=261242&p=1411595&h ... 0#p1411595, ---- but it has had no effect.

I've tried installing the amdgpu-pro driver following the tutorials at other posts here but I ended up breaking my system, and have just now re-installed Linux Mint. I'm willing to attempt this again, but it's hard to know where I went wrong, because there are so many variables.

I would like to think this is a simple enough fix that the open source driver could suffice. Do I simply have to wait for the open source driver to catch up

I suppose I could try this post about patching the fglrx driver for Mint 18.x. Do I really need to go back to an old driver as the most effective solution though?

I could go back to Mint 17.3 and use fglrx, but it's only supported for 12 more months.

I've looked high and low the forums for ideas, but I've finally decided to ask.

I know tearing problems on all kinds of setups come up frequently here, and I'm grateful for your time and help.

Edit : Forgot to mention, I'm using MATE this time.

[deepakdeshp]

Please post output of

Code: Select all

 inxi -Fxz

in code tab.

[thx-1138]

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I know tearing problems on all kinds of setups come up frequently here, and I'm grateful for your time and help.

Edit : Forgot to mention, I'm using MATE this time.

On Mate, under Desktop Settings, have you tried setting the Window Manager to Marco+Compton?
Also, if tearing appears on Firefox, have you tried setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to false?

[EmphaticItalic]

Hello, thank you for the replies.

Setting the Desktop Manager in MATE to 'Macro + Compton' certainly seems to have fixed the problem. The tearing in when web browsing is gone and there is no tearing in videos either online or offline. I will give an update if I continue to find issues - I will not mark this as solved just yet until after further testing.

It doesn't really explain the tearing problems I was having in Xfce or Cinnamon. I suppose they would also have internal settings to be tweaked here, Or perhaps, the creating 20-amdgpu.conf in Cinnamon or Xfce would suffice to take care of the problem.

I'm guessing making the 'Macro + Compton' change in MATE also allows the 20-amdgpu.conf to take effect.

layers.acceleration.force-enabled in Firefox is already set to false by default. I had tried Chromium recently as well and was having the same tearing issues anyway.

[thx-1138]

........................
It doesn't really explain the tearing problems I was having in Xfce or Cinnamon. I suppose they would also have internal settings to be tweaked here, Or perhaps, the creating 20-amdgpu.conf in Cinnamon or Xfce would suffice to take care of the problem.
........................

Glad it got fixed. I have no idea myself for Cinnamon (so maybe someone else can help / provide instructions for such?), i can tell you for sure though that Compton also does it's magic under XFCE...