Comment 3 for bug 192550

There have been reports of this sort of defect (vertical tearing, or is it horizontal tearing?) with fast-moving video for years. The OpenGL DRI configuration now allows a vblank_mode setting to control synchronization with vertical refresh, but it's not enabled in fglrx, only in the open-source radeon driver.
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What is irritating is that the behavior suddenly re-appears after an upgrade, and no-one takes any notice of bug reports. Ubuntu devs tend to say "Oh, it's a proprietary driver, we can't do anything", while the ATI people say "Works fine in other distros, must be a Ubuntu problem", and nothing gets fixed.

At the moment I have the following video-related problems, all on one machine (ati Radeon Xpress 200M (5955)):

Hardy 32-bit with open-source radeon driver: DRI falls back to unacceptable slow rendering running GoogleEarth; Firefox 3.0 fails to render pages containing transparent picture elements because of a Cairo-related bug; won't run compiz; suspends but won't wake up properly.

Hardy 64-bit with fglrx proprietary driver: vertical tearing (this bug); Googleearth renders frame, frame-contents, and extra windows (tips, photos, info) all independently, and can't synchronize over-lays properly - looks a mess; same Firefox 3.0 cairo bug as 32-bit; won't run compiz; won't suspend.

Meanwhile, Gutsy goes on running everything fine, with fglrx/xgl, including compiz; but won't suspend. And Windows XP just runs, without driver updates or fuss.

 I'm really looking forward to a release (Hardy?, Hardy+1?......) that FIXES problems rather than introducing new ones, or resurrecting old ones.........
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