ATI + Ubuntu = video tearing

[Gully]

Hi all,

I have the following problem: I have an XP/Ubuntu(9.04) dualboot system with an ATI HD 4890 graphics card. In windows the 4890 is a monster that eats Crysis for breakfast, but in Ubuntu the monster seems to be chained by shitty drivers, it can play some older games (Stracraft and Mafia) smoothly without artifacts but it seems sluggish when handling desktop effects and it cannot play video (AVI, MKV) without tearing. The tearing looks like the tearing you see when you play a game with vsync turned off.

There are some older threads (about older ATI cards) on Ubuntuforums that basically blame the issue on ATI's drivers and say there's nothing that can be done about it.

I was wondering if there's been any progress in this department, or not, because Nvidia cards don't seem to have these issues in Ubuntu and this is 2009, so I'd like to get some decent video quality from my $250 graphics card.

I'm using Catalyst 9.9

[suokko]

Hi all,

I have the following problem: I have an XP/Ubuntu(9.04) dualboot system with an ATI HD 4890 graphics card. In windows the 4890 is a monster that eats Crysis for breakfast, but in Ubuntu the monster seems to be chained by shitty drivers, it can play some older games (Stracraft and Mafia) smoothly without artifacts but it seems sluggish when handling desktop effects and it cannot play video (AVI, MKV) without tearing. The tearing looks like the tearing you see when you play a game with vsync turned off.

There are some older threads (about older ATI cards) on Ubuntuforums that basically blame the issue on ATI's drivers and say there's nothing that can be done about it.

I was wondering if there's been any progress in this department, or not, because Nvidia cards don't seem to have these issues in Ubuntu and this is 2009, so I'd like to get some decent video quality from my $250 graphics card.

I'm using Catalyst 9.9

mplayer -vo gl2 gives you a lot better video playback. Ati hasn't done the tear free xv yet. There is also open drivers that provide nice 2D and tear free xv but no stable 3D yet.

[Gully]

mplayer -vo gl2 gives you a lot better video playback. Ati hasn't done the tear free xv yet. There is also open drivers that provide nice 2D and tear free xv but no stable 3D yet.

mplayer -vo gl2 didn't solve the problem right away, but if I set the video output to X11(OpenGL) in Mplayer there's no more tearing!

Thank you so much, I've been looking for months how to solve this!

[Kano]

You have to set the ati driver to quality mode (forces vsync for opengl).

[unimatrix]

You have to set the ati driver to quality mode (forces vsync for opengl).

Well this totally worked.