protonscr

Remote Play screen tearing with hardware decoding

steamopen AMD driversStreaming
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#8386 · opened 2022-02-03 by jmegaffin · updated 2025-04-05 · 5 comments · github
Jjmegaffin 2022-02-03 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): Feb 03 2022
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Ubuntu 20.04
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] Yes
  • Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Streaming any game using Remote Play causes severe screen tearing on the client. Either turning off hardware decoding or causing something to be drawn on top of the stream (e.g. the detailed performance overlay) prevents tearing. Additionally, enabling Option "TearFree" "true" in the AMDGPU .conf file prevents tearing, but it leads to a significantly less smooth experience (which may be an unrelated issue). There is no tearing on the host system, and in-game V-sync settings make no difference. I am using the latest graphics drivers from oibaf, but I was also experiencing this problem on the slightly older drivers from kisak-mesa (the mainline drivers don't support hardware decoding on my system). I don't recall experiencing this when I was setting up my streaming client yesterday, but perhaps I had always had the detailed performance overlay enabled. In any case, this was occurring before today's beta client update.

Here is my system information.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Enable hardware decoding
  2. Set performance overlay to "disabled" or "icons"
  3. Stream any game
Kkisak-valve maintainer 2022-02-03 github

Hello @jmegaffin, this issue should also be mentioned to your video driver vendor.

EDIT: Made the previous line less insistent.

Jjmegaffin 2022-02-03 github

I think you're right, @kisak-valve; this seems to be an issue with the drivers, based on this post which is the only other mention I can find of a similar problem with tearing during video playback on similar hardware (Ryzen 4000 mobile processors).

EDIT: This seems to be a widespread issue with Renoir and AMDGPU. I'm still confused that the detailed performance overlay makes things run perfectly whereas using TearFree has significant drawbacks.

Jjmegaffin 2022-02-05 github

On ChimeraOS, there is no tearing, probably because they use their customized SteamOS compositor.

Uurmamasllama 2022-11-12 github

I'm having this issue on steam deck. Disabling hardware decode does fix it. But it means I'm limited in my quality options to get a smooth experience

Ccrescentduchess 2025-04-05 github

This is still an existing issue. I use Nvidia.

Nothing extracted yet.