22 ms·

Maybe it's overhyped, but tearing does make me feel like I'm using an amateur OS, especially when I'm using X for some weeks and then hop over to wayland or Mac

• josefx 6y ago
  Tearing can be a gigantic issue when you have full screen videos or render games. However as far as I could find these are caused by the KDE/Gnome/etc. compositor not running in sync with the screen refresh rate. Find a way to bypass the compositor(KDE options to disable it, GNOME with full screen windows, or tell the X window to override the compositor) and it goes away. Its easy to lob all problems on X but whats next? Did it also cause 9/11?
  • adrusi 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with the internals enough to know if you're right about tearing being the compositor's fault, though I'd be quite surprised if disabling the compositor resulted in less tearing. But I do know that I experienced tearing using compton with i3 (though much less than i3 with no compositor). If Gnome, KDE and compton all manage to get compositing wrong on X, and yet every wayland compositor manages to get it right, then maybe it is a problem with X, even if there is some arcane way to fix the issue.
    • josefx 6y ago
      > though I'd be quite surprised if disabling the compositor resulted in less tearing I have been running OpenGL based applications on KDE for some time and the answer to tearing was always disabling the compositor in the desktop settings or just overriding the compositor related redirect state of the window. OpenGL tends to sync against vblank anyway so I don't find it surprising that rendering directly to the final output buffer instead of an off screen buffer that is at the mercy of the compositor helps.