Long time Linux user here with an issue I've struggled with for weeks now. I've got a fairly decent computer, lots of horsepower to do what I need to do which isn't much more than surfing the web, a little perl development and run a wiki site with Apache, MySQL and PHP just for my own person use on my internal network.
When I look at any video inside Chrome or Firefox it is impossible to go full screen. The tearing is unbearably bad and the video is choppy and lags something awful.
I upgraded to a 4K monitor a while back and am connected via mini-display port to my card which is a Radeon HD 7970. Here's the specs from lshw:
sudo lshw -C video [sudo] password for mike: *-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Tahiti XT [Radeon HD 7970/8970 OEM / R9 280X] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:28 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:fbc80000-fbcbffff ioport:c000(size=256) memory:c0000-dffff*I've tried almost everything from my search on the internet. Chrome flags and settings - you name it, I've tried it. Currently I'm on Ubuntu 17.04 but I've also tried Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 16.04 all to no avail. I'm also seeing the same issue with other Linux OSes - Opensuse, Fedora, Debian, I've lost count of how many I've tried. The odd thing is, this issue started when I was forced to do a re-install of OpenSuse Leap. It seemed to be fine with my 4K monitor but even now, with a fresh install of OpenSuse it is choppy as hell. Watching 1080p movies in VLC or Smplayer is fine - no issues at all its just an issue with web browsers. Oddly enough,Gnome Web doesn't seem to have this issue but it brings other issues with it that I don't care for. Also, I can dual boot into Windows and Chrome/Firefox work perfectly well. I'm sure its some sort of ATI Driver issue that I haven't managed to work around yet and I have tried the AMD Pro driver as well. On some Linux Oses it made my machine unable to go to XWindows and on other the tearing was still there so I'm at my wits end and would love for any clues or hints that I could try to solve this annoying issue.
Others specs on my machine:
*description: Motherboard
product: M4A78T-E vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC. physical id: 0 version: Rev 1.xx serial: 104549350000078description: CPU
product: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: AM3 size: 3400MHz capacity: 3400MHz width: 64 bits clock: 200MHz*-disk
description: ATA Disk product: TEAM L5 SSD 120G physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@3:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc version: 4B8G DIMM DDR Synchronous 1333 MHz*
Thanks in advance for any clues or hints.
2 Answers
As near as I could tell there really is only one good answer for this. Sold my AMD card and bought an NVIDIA card - problem solved. After trying just about every Linux OS known to man and every possible setting in Chrome or firefox I finally threw the towel in. My first and last experience with an AMD card has come to its logical conclusion.
I have to agree, Nvidia has done way more to support Linux then AMD with their graphics. You have some Nvidia Linux drivers that rival performance in Windows. Plus you upgraded to a 4K monitor which just makes everything worse with a poor performing card.
