Screen tearing issues

I have a nvidia 960 card and have the nvidia drivers installed. I am getting bad screen tearing, even when just scrolling text in Firefox.

I found a temporary fix, that sometimes only lasts a few minutes. I change the compostor rendering back end to something random and then move it back to opengl 3.1. Should I just turn it off?

I have:

Scale Method: accurate
rendering backend: opengl 3.1
opengl interface: GLX
tearing prevention full screen repaints

I am not sure where else I can permentantly fix this. Any help is appreciated.

  1. Is this a laptop??

  2. what driver is used

  3. are you up to date with updates??

  1. desktop

  2. Whatever the current driver is in the nvidia repo: nvidia-computeG04 nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default nvidia-glG04 x11-video-nvidiaG04 xf86-video-nv libdrm_nouveau2 libvdpau_nouveau xf86-video-nouveau

  3. yes

QT graphics = raster???

did you try the nvidia-configure app
what’s the resolution and refresh rate?
I’ve had 2 monitors with different aspect ratios and different resolution hooked up to my leap and had no tearing, I think I read somewhere that newer cards have a power saving feature that may cause issues, in the nvidia app see how your gpu is set up is performance or power save.

I’ve had the same issues and found that this solved it for me: http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/got-tearing-with-proprietary-nvidia-try-this

The steps in the link seems to have solved it. Thanks. That is a pretty obscure fix.

I have one graphics card and two monitors with different screen resolutions(1920x1080 & 1920x1200) both with the same refresh. I did have a question.

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf there is only one screen listed. Here is the relevant part of the file:

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0”
VendorName “Unknown”
ModelName “Unknown”
HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0
Option “DPMS”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Device0”
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “NVIDIA Corporation”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0”
Device “Device0”
Monitor “Monitor0”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
EndSubSection
Option “CoolBits” “1”
Option “TripleBuffer” “True”
Option “metamodes” “nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }”
EndSection

I added the three Options based on the page linked. Is there a problem that there is not a Screen1?

Are Coolbits and TripleBuffer needed?

Also, what is the purpose of the files /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/? Most of them just have comments in them. Should I have put the Options in 50-screen.conf?

the xorg.cof.d files are the newer and preferred way to set up xorg. xorg.conf still works but the files in xorg.conf.d are the new way and represent section of the xorg.conf file. Best to leave them alone or use them instead of the xorg.conf file

why not use the nvidia-configure app?
as gogalthorp said xorg.conf is depreciated (but still works)
you can try ti run nvidia-configure as root and set and save your preference in the xorg.conf, by default opensuse comes without an xorg.conf file

I experienced a diagonal tear when scrolling in Firefox. I found a simple solution that worked for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/4o4ayd/firefox_47_strange_diagonal_scrolling_graphics/

The solution was to go to about:config in Firefox and change the setting gfx.xrenderer.enabled=true.

this is not about firefox, that’s a bug in firefox 47+ and intel chips not nvidia

Another alternative fix for those still struggling: https://iwf1.com/finally-nvidia-tearing-issue-fix-found/

that doesn’t quite work on opensuse
you can’t call a gui app with sudo or with su, you need to use kdesu or gnomesu
if it’s a driver issue we will get updated drivers automatically no need to mess with kernel objects and xorg.conf has been depreciated, running nvidia-configure as an ordinary userr is sufficient on a per user basis you can do kdesu nvidia-configure to set those options system wide

There is no nvidia-configure app.

There is:

nvidia-bug-report.sh nvidia-debugdump nvidia-settings
nvidia-cuda-mps-control nvidia-modprobe nvidia-smi
nvidia-cuda-mps-server nvidia-persistenced nvidia-xconfig

nvidia-xconfig just overwrites the xorg.conf file, nvidia-settings has few actual settings.

I found that having both the compositor’s and nvidia’s vsync enabled caused tearing.
You might try disabling one or the other.

Something else to note is that tearing seems much worse with FireFox,
compared to Chromium.

sorry it’s called nvidia-settings
/usr/bin/nvidia-settings
it has a launcher just search for nvidia in your start menu

I can confirm this, it didn’t use to happen to me until Firefox 48 and on pages with a lot of images, I think with Firefox 48 and mozilla’s use of rust (their new programming language) might have broken something

For nvidia (and probably other gpu) users having taring issues with plasma 5, I think I found the problem
After noticing the cube effect stopped working I went in system settings to see what’s going on, the cube effect was selected but didn’t seam to work, going in Display and Monitor -> Compositor it turned out that composing was disabled when I re-enabeled it I got a warrning that in the past kwin5 had crashed and composing was disabled automaticly, composing is needed to prevent tearing so if you have taring issues check composing after reenabling it the tearing I had in firefox disappeared
and I got the cube back.