Question

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 ?

Answer 1

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.