[SOLVED] Screen tearing 19.1-Mate AMD A6-6400K / HD-8470D

[sohosources]

Hi, gang,

I know this is a maddening issue, but I'm hoping someone can help me sort through the crazy maze of options.

19.1-Mate working perfectly on A6-6400K system with the exception of screen tearing during video playback on VLC and SMPLAYER, and sometimes in browsers and on YouTube. I don't run games on this system, so it's really just about screen tearing and not ultimate 3D performance.

Known:
A6-6400K (Richland with built-in HD-8470D), 4 GB RAM, SATA SSD.
Existing: AMD Aruba 4.15.0-45 LLVM 7.0.0 XORG 3.1 MESA 18.2.2
Performance is fine, save for the video tearing

No optional/proprietary drivers listed in Driver Manager

The A6 provides a lotta bang for the buck, with a low power draw, but I have other vid cards that could be installed. These include:

Radeon HD-4350
Radeon HD-3200
Radeon HD-3450
AMD X300SE

Nvidia 7950GT-OC (that outta dim the lights!)
Nvidia 8600GTS
Nvidia 8500GT
Nvidia 8400GS (need to replace a capacitor)
Nvidia N6600

Again: Just want smooth video...don't need to play games on this system.

As always, thanks for your help,

--sohosources

[roblm]

Try changing the Window Manager. Go to Preferences > Desktop Settings > Windows > Window Manager. Change the setting to Marco + Compton, and others.

If that doesn’t help, use this command to create an xorg.conf file: sudo touch /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Open the file for editing: xed admin:///etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add these lines:

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
   Identifier   "Device0"
   Driver   "radeon"   			
   Option "TearFree" "on"
EndSection

Logout and back in.

[sohosources]

Thank you. Will try this tonight when I get home.

--sohosources

[sohosources]

Wow.

Just switching to Marco + Compton (from Marco + compositing, which sounds quite similar) seems to have completely fixed everything!

THANK YOU!

It's so weird that when using a Linux distro I can switch major chunks of the OS back and forth without rebooting. While watching a now-smooth video, I can switch the window manager on the fly to what it was originally set to...and then the video gets choppy and torn. Switch it back, all without ever even stopping the movie, and poof -- smooth again!

I may test the rest of your suggestions "just because," but your settings fix really saved the day. This little A6-6400K box, with an SSD and 8 GB RAM (was 4 GB), was always fast, but now it's also smooth!

With a few tweaks, 19.1-Mate nicely runs all of my software and plays nice with my Windows-based file server.

It's fantastic/frustrating that such a small change made such a big difference.

Thanks again,

--sohosources