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Bazzite•2w ago•
9 replies
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Screen tearing in games on KDE Plasma, even with Adaptive Sync Enabled

bughardware-compat
Hey gang! Long time Bazzite user, first time poster.

Overall, i've been having issues with screen tearing with fullscreen/borderless windows games playing in Plasma, might be an issue with variable refresh rate. Ideally I don't want to use vsync.

I've recently installed Bazzite KDE on a desktop computer. The monitor supports freesync and I have an AMD GPU. In games where the framerate cap is 144 (the max refresh rate of the monitor) the games will screen tear noticeably. I suspect this is due to a lack of actual Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) on the KDE desktop of bazzite. This occurs no matter if the adaptive sync setting in KDE is turned to never, automatic, or always.

if you run
cat /sys/module/amdgpu/parameters/freesync_video
cat /sys/module/amdgpu/parameters/freesync_video
it outputs 0 by default, implying freesync is disabled out of the box. I tried enable it by doing
rpm-ostree kargs --append=amdgpu.freesync_video=1
rpm-ostree kargs --append=amdgpu.freesync_video=1
, but it didn't seem to address the actual screen tearing. I set it back to 0 because kwin got choppy with it....

While Vsync does "fix" this tearing issue, I think there is a bigger issue. Usually with VRR, the GPU and the monitor will ensure the frame timings will line up with the refresh rate at those max FPS situations. In my case, this worked without issues on windows. I also haven't seen screen tearing on my HTPC and ROG Ally but I suspect it's because they're running in gamescope (or gnome, hard to tell).

Setup:
AMD RX 6700XT
LG Ultragear 27 (freesync compatable)
Connected via display port.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need me to clarify anything. I'm pretty comfortable with the terminal in case you need me to run any commands. Thanks!
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