Hello everyone. I’ve read some posts before about Linux behaving poorly when using multiple monitors that have a different refresh rate.
Does anybody here know if X11 + AMDGPU + Mesa + Gnome handles this correctly? I’m thinking of getting a high refresh rate monitor (120hz+) while keeping my secondary at 60hz.
Only Wayland correctly supports multiple refresh rates. If you use to refresh rates on X11, it will refresh the screen at the highest rate. This is likely to cause tearing on the lower refresh rate screen.
If you don’t have to put up with Nvidia and there’s nothing tying you to X11 I recommend making the jump to Wayland, a lot of these sorts of issues have been solved over there
When I was on X11 (kde), my 144hz monitor would frequently feel like it was operating at 60hz but I could never figure out what the cause was. I used to turn off my 60hz monitor before gaming as a workaround. I quickly switched to wayland and haven’t had to deal with it since.
I have a 144Hz between a 60 Hz and a 75 Hz monitor.
It’s not perfect, but does the job decently. In your
~/.profile
:export KWIN_X11_REFRESH_RATE=144000 export KWIN_X11_NO_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 export KWIN_X11_FORCE_SOFTWARE_VSYNC=1
If you enable TearFree, it makes the lack of proper vsync less noticeable and fixes the tearing caused by software vsync.
OP’s probably SoL for Gnome though, because Gnome.