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graphicsx11sdlpygamevsync

How to avoid tearing with pygame on Linux/X11

I've been playing with pygame (on Debian/Lenny). It seems to work nicely, except for annoying tearing of blits (fullscreen or windowed mode).

I'm using the default SDL X11 driver. Googling suggests that it's a known issue with SDL that X11 provides no vsync facility (even with a display created with FULLSCREEN|DOUBLEBUF|HWSURFACE flags), and I should use the "dga" driver instead.

However, running

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dga ./mygame.py

throws in pygame initialisation with 

pygame.error: No available video device

(despite xdpyinfo showing an XFree86-DGA extension present).

So: what's the trick to getting tear-free vsynced flips ? Either by getting this dga thing working or some other mechanism ?

Solution

  • Well my eventual solution was to switch to Pyglet, which seems to support OpenGL much better than Pygame, and doesn't have any flicker problems.