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.
Personally I have never had issues with my monitors having different refresh rates, at least not while using Gnome. Maybe it is more of a X11 KDE issue.
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.
I have that stack except in KDE and I have had no issues.
Right now, you can use xorg or wayland with multiple monitors and different refresh rates without problems. What is really the problem, at least for me, it is the VRR( variable refresh rate) like freesync. If one of your monitor has it, and you need it while playing, for xorg with gnome you must have to turn off the other monitors, while with wayland the patch for it it’s not merged yet.
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.
