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So I installed Elementary and updated everything. My problem is videos on YouTube have tearing and also videos at 60fps are not fluid all the time, they would have kind of "mini-stutters" quite often. I was wondering if this has to do with the drivers. As far as I know they are installed and (assume) the latest version (even if the information screen has messed up information - see picture below). I'm using Firefox web browser. Found here someone saying to change to "true" some command named gfx.xrender on Firefox, that didn't work (so I put it back as it was before). Is there anything I can do about this? Thanks in advance. PC hardware is also shown on the picture.

It shows my processor is Quad-core and I have more than 8GB's of RAM

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  • Have you tested this in any other browsers? I used to experience this in Epiphany. Chrome always worked.
    – pretz
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 16:35
  • @PretzelJones Sorry for the delay. Yes, I tried Chromium and Epihany besides Firefox before posting here. Same issue. Commented Apr 30, 2017 at 2:34
  • @PretzelJones I just tried Chrome again. The issue is still there but a bit less. Epiphany doesn't seem to have it but the video quality doesn't look as good (and other things don't work that well either). I tried disabling smooth scrolling and/or hardware acceleration too, but no solution. It bugs me because this doesn't happen in other distros but I really like Elementary (specially the mail client, I love it) and watching videos is all I'm gonna do. Commented Apr 30, 2017 at 6:01
  • Let's see what driver are you currently using. Post the Terminal output of lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3
    – Vlad
    Commented Apr 30, 2017 at 13:15
  • @PopVlad this is what I got: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370 OEM] [1002:6810] Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Curacao XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370 OEM] [174b:e271] Kernel driver in use: radeon Kernel modules: radeon Commented Apr 30, 2017 at 18:29

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There are many suggestions online and I'm sure you've already seen many of them, but most are either impractical (modifying Chrome paramaters, only to have them reset by an update) or even, in my opinion, too risky (patching and installing the unsupported amdgpu driver).
Fortunately the open-source radeon driver got A LOT better since kernel 4.4 (currently run by elementary OS), so there isn't much else to recommend, except a kernel upgrade. Keep in mind kernel upgrades are usually discouraged, especially when it comes to production environments since they can lead to data loss and unstable, sometimes unresponsive, systems. Still, a newer kernel usually brings improvements
If you're willing to test it, notable improvements to the radeon driver have been made beginning with kernel 4.9.
If you run in any trouble booting a newly installed kernel, you can always reboot and select the older functioning one from the grub menu (press and hold Shift key while booting).

Instructions (run the following commands in Terminal, one line at a time, input your password when prompted; lines beginning with wget are long, make sure to copy them correctly):

mkdir tmp

cd tmp

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.9.25/linux-headers-4.9.25-040925_4.9.25-040925.201704270431_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.9.25/linux-headers-4.9.25-040925-generic_4.9.25-040925.201704270431_amd64.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.9.25/linux-image-4.9.25-040925-generic_4.9.25-040925.201704270431_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

sudo reboot  

To see the currently running kernel use uname -r in Terminal.

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  • Thanks a lot for this! Can't upvote due to low rep, so sorry for that. Will mark as answer after trying this out if it works. Commented May 1, 2017 at 0:05
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    This did not work. The issue still there. It's noticeable when watching on Fullscreen. If I don't fullscreen it's ok. :S Commented May 1, 2017 at 0:15
  • I'm sorry it did not work, thank you for trying. Just to clarify: does this happen only in Firefox? If you open a local HD video (from your HDD) in Videos or VLC and go full screen is the issue still there?
    – Vlad
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 11:06

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