How to enable TearFree?

Q&A
1

Hi everyone!

The i3 window manager always has a lot of tearing, especially when scrolling browser pages, PDFs or watching videos. I tried following the ArchWiki tutorial on how to enable TearFree, adding to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf or /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf the following content:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
  Driver      "intel"
  Option      "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

However, after adding this configuration file, Xorg fails to start when logging in, on both i3 and GNOME.

Did someone else have the same problem? How can I fix the tearing?

Thank you, and happy Independence Day for those in the US! :smile:

2 
[     2.491] (==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0
[     2.491] (==) Matched modesetting as autoconfigured driver 1
[     2.491] (II) LoadModule: "intel"
[     2.493] (WW) Warning, couldn't open module intel
[     2.493] (EE) Failed to load module "intel" (module does not exist, 0)
[     2.493] (II) LoadModule: "modesetting"
[     2.493] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/modesetting_drv.so
[     2.494] (II) Module modesetting: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[     2.496] (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms

That is likely due to not having the intel driver installed and I don’t think it is part of Clear anymore, favouring the modesetting driver.

1 Like
3

Thank you @sunnyflunk, I wasn’t aware of that!

It seems that one way to eliminate tearing when using the modesetting driver is adding a compositor like Compton to i3, or – more drastically – replace the latter with a desktop environment like sway, which has a builtin compositor.