[SOLVED] Dual monitors with different refresh rates

Gotolei · 2021-02-16 16:43:10

I have two monitors, with the main one connecting over displayport and set to 1080/144hz, and the secondary connecting over dvi set to 1080/60hz. Xfce's display settings detects and applies the different refresh rates just fine, and xrandr's output reflects that. However, the rest of the DE is another story:

- Xfwm compositor, vsync on: both displays are locked to 60hz, even if there's a window that's been fullscreened
- Picom: same as above, even with refresh rate set to 144, except with the addition of all the broken borders regarding window blur and shadows
- Xfwm compositor, vsync turned off: displays run at their proper refresh rates, but the screen tearing is omnipresent, even in fullscreened windows
- Compositor turned off entirely: displays run at their proper refresh rates, and fullscreen windows are able to manage their own vsync properly. However, the screen tearing on all other windows and the solid blacked-out borders around any CSD application (as well as menus and other gtk elements) make this far from ideal
- Compiz: both displays are locked to 60hz, unless a window has been fullscreened in which case the fullscreened window can use the display's own refresh rate and can vsync properly. This is what I'm rolling with currently, but it has its own sets of problems like refresh rate dropping back down to 60 if a notification appears, half the windows not having icons in alt-tab and quite a few of the plugins having their own host of bugs

Of note, across all the scenarios above, the cursor still updates visibly faster on the main 144hz display, no matter how broken the things beneath it are. So I know that on some layer of the system, things are working as they should.

Distro is Manjaro (so xfwm4 4.16.1), kernel 5.10.15. GPU is RX 580 running amdgpu 19.1, so anything that involves nvidia's control panel is naturally entirely irrelevant for my case. At this point, I don't even care about freesync, and from what I hear it's a complete write-off when there's more than one monitor anyways.

Has anyone managed to get this sort of thing working in xfce? Are there any other normal, stacking window managers that do work for this?

Last edited by Gotolei (2021-02-18 00:27:56)

Gotolei · 2021-02-18 00:27:38

So thanks to a reply on the subreddit post I made just before this topic, turns out you can set up vsync to run on the driver level and just let the various compositors be confused on their own time. Nvidia has their own control panel thing, AMD has TearFree that can be enabled in the usual xorg configs. With that set up, I now have everything on each monitor running at their own native refresh rate, even normal windows, and it persists through reboots.

Now this hardly fixes the issue with xfwm itself, but there is at least a quite viable workaround for it. So I'm marking this as solved.

Last edited by Gotolei (2021-02-18 00:28:06)

ToZ · 2021-02-18 00:50:48

Thanks for posting back with the solution. This will be useful for others experiencing the same issue.

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#1 2021-02-16 16:43:10

[SOLVED] Dual monitors with different refresh rates

#2 2021-02-18 00:27:38

Re: [SOLVED] Dual monitors with different refresh rates

#3 2021-02-18 00:50:48

Re: [SOLVED] Dual monitors with different refresh rates

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