Ubuntu & Debian Abandon Intel X.Org Driver For Most Hardware, Moves To Modesetting DDX

[JonathanM]

dont try on 1.17. since modesettings is released as part of xorg server, everything that is not current (1.18.4) isnt good to use. especially the 1.17 series...

I wasn't planning on trying it with my current setup, but thanks for the info.

[chrisb]

That's not true at all. Intel's proprietary driver on windows tears just as bad. Evey icon, every video, every scroll,.... It's horrible and it's been this way for years. I never could understand how people could deal with it.

Maybe it's just Windows. Intel's proprietary driver on OS X works fine.

[ypnos]

Me too, HD4000 tearing horribly with modesetting on a fresh install of DebianSid/XFCE. Does anyone know if modesetting is even supposed to not tear on modern Intel GPUs?

Well, I don't really know what it is supposed to do, but as I had mentioned, on my setup the tearing problems vanished after switching to the modesetting driver.
Arch Linux running on an i5-6600 processor (HD Graphics 530).

I use mpv to play video. I had tearing in mpv before, now gone. I also had tearing when scrolling in Chromium, now gone. The example video somebody posted along his bug report also plays tearing-free for me both via Chromium and mpv.

During my intel driver days, I also stumbled upon this: https://github.com/lvml/mpv-plugin-xrandr
It is a really great tool that I highly recommend for watching films. What it does is that for example my monitor supports the following refresh rates:
1920x1080 60.00 50.00 59.94 30.00 25.00 24.00 29.97 23.98

When playing a film that has 24fps, mpv would initially change the refresh rate to that. Then you can experience the movie without any stuttering. Note that playing 24fps on 60 hz would give you subtle stutter (and/or tearing).
This also worked flawlessly for me with the intel driver but only if I didn't cycle between fullscreen/windowed mode after starting playback (so I had to use -fs).

[andre30correia]

Maybe it's just Windows. Intel's proprietary driver on OS X works fine.

you can say, it not works at all.

using ubuntu 16..04 proposed 4.4 kernel with padoka ppa intel skylake optimus laptop (using bumblebee and sna) everything works. the stable drivers have bugs with chromium/chrome and kernel 4.6/4.7 are a bug for intel users

[duby229]

Maybe it's just Windows. Intel's proprietary driver on OS X works fine.

Apple wrote their own Intel driver, so perhaps related. The benches I've seen show it slow as molasses in winter, but if it doesn't tear that alone makes it better. IMO.

[davidbepo]

happy intel ddx user here, no problems with dri3 + sna also i get extremely good performance

[starshipeleven]

Apple wrote their own Intel driver, so perhaps related.

Apple ships a slightly modified version of a driver made by Intel.

The benches I've seen show it slow as molasses in winter, but if it doesn't tear that alone makes it better. IMO.

No tearing on macs either, can you link the benches you've seen?

[tholin]

If modesetting is good enough for debian perhaps it's good enough for me. I decided to test it and it works surprisingly well.

If I use intel's drivers without any xorg.conf setting it defaults to SNA and it's horrible. It doesn't do any vsync so it's useless. With tearfree turned on vsync works, sort of. There is jitter in how long it takes for vsyncs to complete which causes problem with mpv's video-sync=display-resample option. If there is too much jitter mpv fails to draw the frame in time and you get stuttering. Tearfree also causes various graphic glitches so it's also not useful. Perhaps latests git works better but you shouldn't have to use git to run several years old hardware.

Since SNA doesn't work at all I use UXA and it works ok*. I still get graphical glitches on window status bars sometimes but it's a small problem. Modesetting actually works equally well and perhaps with slightly better performance. gtkperf was 25.50 before, 20.53 now. Running cat on a large text file in xterm took 12.821s before, 5.706s now.

Unfortunately I now get some graphics corruption in the moodbar in clementine. Is sometimes flicker with black bars. I'm still using xorg-server-1.17.4 so perhaps it's fixed in 1.18 but I don't feel like updating yet.

* What I mean by ok is it's as good as it gets, which is quite bad. I've never gotten composition to work right ever. Doesn't matter which compositor, hardware or drivers are used. I can never get tearing and jitterfree playback of 60fps videos on both my monitors so composition just can't be used. Without composition everything that isn't accelerated tears. Moving windows, scrolling text and all other painting tears. At least video plays right without composition as long as you only play one video at the time. If I play videos on both monitors at the same time one will always tear.

[whirm]

wow that was a big step backwards. The modesetting driver on my skylake system has terrible tearing really really bad all over. moving windows playing video. had to go back to the old driver.

It was driving me crazy too but it's easy to fix:

[pq1930562]

Intel's proprietary driver on windows tears just as bad. Evey icon, every video, every scroll,.... It's horrible and it's been this way for years. I never could understand how people could deal with it.

Wrong.

Tearing is entirely absent from Windows since Windows Vista and since the introduction of DWM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager).

As long as you are using DWM (i.e. Aero enabled), there is no tearing whatsoever in Windows, regardless of what GPU you are using.

The Intel driver for Windows also has no tearing with DWM enabled, just like any other GPU on Windows with DWM enabled

The Windows desktop is entirely tear-free since ten years already:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/gre...-acceleration/