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I am using Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS amd64, with an AMD Radeon 590 graphics card.

By default, there appears to be massive tearing in just about everything you do. Moving windows, watching a movie, watching Youtube, everything!

Besides being annoyed, I am surprised! How is it possible that in 2019, by default with modern hardware and software, users get to see screen tearing? How is that possible? Why is the default not to avoid screen tearing by waiting for vertical retrace (vsync) ?

Many search results go back to 2010 and stuff, which appear to be outdated. One source for 18.04 and AMD graphics cards suggested the following, which i tried:

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf

And enter:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Radeon"
    Driver "radeon"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "DRI" "3"
    Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"
EndSection

Sadly, it did not work. Also not after sudo service gdm restart and a full reboot.

Even worse, before i rebooted, it appeared that the gnome panel was broken, because launching certain applications such as the file manager (nautilus) and the text editor (gedit) did not work; clicking the icon did nothing except showing a 'loading' mouse cursor. When launching 'gedit' from the gnome-terminal, it worked again. After rebooting, the issue appears to be gone.

I so much hope one day there will be an open-source operating system where 'things just work' like virtually all users want to! Until then, can you people be so kind as to direct me to instructions on how to fix the screen tearing issue on my system?

Many thanks in advance for your efforts and time!

Requested additional information:

$ sudo lshw -c video
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:26:00.0
       version: e7
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0
       resources: irq:65 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f0000000-f01fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fe900000-fe93ffff memory:c0000-dffff

and:

$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
DisplayPort-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DisplayPort-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DisplayPort-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-A-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-D-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 510mm x 287mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+
   1680x1050     60.00  
   1280x1024     75.02    60.02  
   1440x900      60.00  
   1280x800      60.00  
   1152x864      75.00  
   1280x720      60.00  
   1024x768      75.03    60.00  
   800x600       75.00    60.32  
   640x480       75.00    59.94  
   720x400       70.08
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  • Can you please give us the output of lshw -c video and of xrandr (run both in a terminal)?
    – ejjl
    Apr 5, 2019 at 20:53

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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You are using the amdgpu driver, which is correct for your video card. In the config file that you added, you are referring to a driver you are not using (radeon).

What happens if you change the respective settings to the following:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "AMD"
  Driver "amdgpu"
  Option "TearFree" "true"
  Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection

?

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