The inability to have stable video playback in Linux with the ATI Graphics Driver as always been a major gripe of mine. Video tearing has been a real irritating issue, but it appears that ATI may have finally solved the tearing problem. It only took forever and a day but none the less, I have just watched a DVD on my laptop with no tearing or other artifacts ruining the experience.

Install the latest available ATI Catalyst Driver preferably 10.11 or greater. I'm testing with 10.12 and Fedora 14 with kernel 2.6.35.10-74.

ATI Catalyst Driver version 10.12 is available from RPM Fusion nonfree repo.

Other pertinent info:

• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
• I'm using SMPlayer with the video output driver set to "gl {fast - ATI Cards}".
• In ATI Catalyst Control "Wait for vertical refresh" is set to "always on"

This should probably work on all RPM based linux distros and using a different repo to get the catalyst driver also with Debian/Ubuntu.

Open a terminal and enter the following:

$ sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-u32=DDX,EnableTearFreeDesktop,1

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Enjoy the non tearing goodness. :-)

 If you have any problems after enabling this setting. Disable it with:

$ sudo aticonfig --del-pcs-key=DDX,EnableTearFreeDesktop

$ sudo shutdown -r now

I garnered this information from Phoronix and have replicated it here purely to help as many people as possible.