Wednesday 30 October 2019

Xubuntu 19.10 Mesa DRI Intel P530 - glitchy flurry screensaver

I recently upgraded from Xubuntu 17.04 to 19.10 and came across an issue where the flurry screensaver would be very glitchy. It would jump and skip every few seconds giving a very unpleasant experience. Far from the usual psychedelic smoothness that we are all used to.

I tried all sorts of things but eventually came across this reference:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics#Disable_Vertical_Synchronization_(VSYNC)

Setting my ~/.drirc to:

<driconf>
    <device>
        <application name="Flurry Screensaver" executable="flurry">
          <!--
            Without this flurry screen saver will jump about
            Turn vertical synchronization off:
            -->
          <option name="vblank_mode" value="0"/>
        </application>
    </device>
</driconf> 
As the comment says - this disables vertical synchronization - something to do with using triple buffering on the Intel Driver.