hello everybody!!! happy cheerful holidays and stuff!!! 
so i got a problem…
um, so im using the handheld edition to play some old games on my steam deck, and so in KDE’s X11 mode i have a lot of screen tearing (that i dont like), even though KDE should come with compositor! no problem on wayland, happens only in X11! it also doesnt matter if im in windowed, borderless, fullscreen or anything, doesnt matter if i have vsync turned on or i limit my fps, nothing… i couldnt find any config to edit, nor any “allow tearing” check box anywhere, so i dont know what to do 
thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks
Basically everyone is transitioning to Wayland, though I would have expected X11 to still be at full parity, but I wouldn’t worry about it and just use Wayland myself.
i cant not worry about it because i am sensitive to motion. on wayland and xwayland such an old game causes black screen flickering as it tries to render the window frame, and on X11 i get screen tearing, which is still very nauseating
i understand that X11 is the old legacy boomer window system, but there is no way not to use it in my case, some older linux native games were coded only for X11
and unfortunately yes, wayland and X11 have different latencies, diffferent settings (as per usual), one doesnt even have a functional compositor for some reason… fresh install btw!
it looks like it might work, but it didn’t. neither the link or your solution. i’m sorry… you get a heart anyway
i should once again mention that i am on a steam deck, so there may be a hardware limitation
This is part of the X11 conf that I use.
It might help with your problem, but you have to change the variables to reach what you want. Because the settings are for nvidia and to allow tearing to reach lower latencies.
Section "Device"
Identifier "NvidiaDevice"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "TearFree" "false"
Option "AsyncFlipSecondaries" "false"
Option "VariableRefresh" "false"
Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
Option "TripleBuffer" "false"
Option "PageFlip" "false"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "false"
Option "Coolbits" "31"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
Option "metamodes" "DP-2: nvidia-auto-select +0+0 {ForceCompositionPipeline=Off, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=Off, AllowGSYNC=Off, AllowGSYNCCompatible=Off, SyncToVBlank=0, AllowFlipping=0}"
Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x3333; PowerMizerDefault=0x2; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1"
Option "TripleBuffer" "false"
Option "PageFlip" "false"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "false"
Option "UseNvKmsCompositionPipeline" "false"
EndSection
Section "OutputClass"
Identifier "nvidia"
MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "false"
Option "TripleBuffer" "false"
Option "PageFlip" "false"
Option "TearFree" "false"
Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
Option "Coolbits" "31"
EndSection
You can create a .conf file with any name and add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
yes, i have tried
Section "Device"
Identifier "AMD Graphics"
Driver "amdgpu"
Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection
and it did not work. i’ve tried everything, as i said. i think it’s hardware related. besides, it probably works only for dedicated GPU’s, im afraid
❯ lspci -k | grep -A 3 -E "(VGA|3D)"
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] VanGogh [AMD Custom GPU 0405] (rev ae)
Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 0123
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: amdgpu
no radeon here, so handheld edition’s automatic hardware detection did its job correctly. there’s just no configs for X11 whatsoever. which is a bit sad, considering there’s no way to do that on steamOS, and here it’s very barebones and without configs…
/etc/modprobe.d/ is empty
/etc/mkinitcpio.conf 's only module is crc32c, so also empty