[2.0]How to solve video tearing on AMD Graphics in Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.

What is Video Tearing ?

    Screen tearing is a visual artifact in video display where a display device shows information from multiple frames in a single screen draw.
     The artifact occurs when the video feed to the device is not in sync with the display's refresh rate. This can be due to non-matching refresh rates—in which case the tear line moves as the phase difference changes (with speed proportional to difference of frame rates). It can also occur simply from lack of sync between two equal frame rates, in which case the tear line is at a fixed location that corresponds to the phase difference. During video motion, screen tearing creates a torn look as edges of objects (such as a wall or a tree) fail to line up.
     Tearing can occur with most common display technologies and video cards, and is most noticeable in horizontally-moving visuals, such as in slow camera pans in a movie, or classic side-scrolling video games.
Screen tearing is less noticeable when more than two frames finish rendering during the same refresh interval, since this means the screen has several narrower tears instead of a single wider one.

*This works only with Open Source Video Drivers  !NOT WITH CATALYST DRIVER

!!!First install mesa utilitis if u dont have it!!

Type/Copy this into your terminal (ctrl-alt-t)

sudo apt-get install driconf

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Now to solve the video tearing

Type/Copy this into your terminal (ctrl-alt-t)

sudo mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

echo -e 'Section "Device"
    Identifier "Radeon"
    Driver "radeon"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "DRI" "3"
    Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"
EndSection' | sudo tee /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amd.conf

sudo reboot

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*"sudo reboot" will restart the pc!!!!

To revert back to the default acceleration method , just delete the file you created.

Type this into your terminal

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amd.conf

sudo reboot

*"sudo reboot" will restart the pc!!!!

 

 Option "DRI" "3" this will enable DRIconf

        What is DRIConf ?

DRIconf is a configuration applet for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. It allows customizing performance and visual quality settings of OpenGL drivers on a per-driver, per-screen and/or per-application level.

The settings are stored in system wide and per-user XML configuration files, which are parsed by the OpenGL drivers on startup. For more details see ConfigurationInfrastructure.

DRIConf is written in Python with the python-gtk toolkit bindings.

Option "AccelMethod" "glamor" this will enable Glamore

      What is Glamore ? 

The glamor module is an open-source 2D graphics common driver for the X Window System as implemented by X.org. It supports a variety of graphics chipsets which have OpenGL/EGL/GBM supports.

It’s a GL-based rendering acceleration library for X server:

It uses GL functions and shader to complete the 2D graphics operations.

It uses normal texture to represent a drawable pixmap if possible.

It calls GL functions to render to the texture directly. It’s somehow hardware independent. And could be a building block of any X server’s DDX driver:

Xorg’s DDX driver could leverage glamor-egl package to create an egl context without any native X system. The xf86-video-modesetting driver uses glamor by default but other drivers have support for it (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel). This package can support every platform which has OpenGL and gbm and drm libraries.

Why Glamor?

Basically, the biggest two advantages of Glamor is:

Graphic device has powerful 3D capability. To use 3D function to accelerate 2D rendering is possible and many drivers already do so. OpenGL provides a more convenient and standard interface to leverage GFX device’s 3D power. It would be better to call OpenGL directly rather than manually write 3D pipeline control code for each different GFX device.

We have heard of complains about why we need to develop two version drivers for a single graphic device for a long time. One is for mesa’s DRI driver and the other is for 2D DDX driver. One of glamor’s purpose is to eliminate the latter one.

!!!!!Note older AMD cards will not support Glamor!!!!!