Screen Tearing in Ubuntu UNLESS mpv is playing a video

[tinglycraniumplacidly]

I have a weird problem. My screen randomly flickers/tears. It's super annoying. But when I play a video in mpv, the flickering stops. I don't have any special config regarding playback in my mpv config.

Wondering if anyone can point me to a solution to get my screen to stop flickering without a video playing 🤪.

Running Ubuntu 24.10
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Lexa XT [Radeon PRO WX 2100]

[CounterPillow]

This sounds like the type of thing you'd get when running X11 without a compositor taking care of global vblank. Is that what you're doing?

[tinglycraniumplacidly]

that sounds exactly right. i will look into running a compositor. thank you sooooo much. it's been driving me crazy.

[tinglycraniumplacidly]

i installed picom and am running it with vsync = true but it's still glitching out. Even when I'm playing something in mpv - it's just a lot less frequent when I am playing a vid.

i also tried using kde6 w/wayland, and that still had screen tearing. (possibly due to running an xwindows bridge?) i really can't say. but the problem is unfortunately persisting.

also should note:

apt install amdgpu
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

Unsatisfied dependencies:
 gst-omx-amdgpu : Depends: libomxil-bellagio0 but it is not installable
 mesa-amdgpu-omx-drivers : Depends: libomxil-bellagio0 but it is not installable
Error: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

and i may need to wait for drivers to be updated? 😫

[tinglycraniumplacidly]

just as an update, it seems to have to do with sawfish (my window manager) and using xfce4 as the desktop environment. It's strange because my laptop runs pretty much the same config and it has no problems.

running a compositor (picom) definitely helps resolve the issue - it was already running on my laptop bc of session startups. I'm going to try to make my desktop config exactly the same and see if the issue persists.

this is all after changing from lowlatency to generic kernels and trying the various amdgpu install options. (I'm back on the kernel version).

[tinglycraniumplacidly]

At one point I tried a Live install of Ubuntu 24.10, and even that had glitching running KDE on stock settings. I ordered a new video card, a WX 7100, and all my tearing is gone. 😭