Screen glitch or screen tearing

Support & Help Requests Hardware
1

Hello all

i’ve some bad screen issues on MATE 16, then on MATE 17 : my screen is tearing !
This appears when i scroll down into a web page with Firefox or when i watch a movie with VLC.

I use nvidia drivers and Marco, but this issue goes away with Compiz. The problem is that Compiz doesn’t decorate my windows as Marco does !

Thank-you for your help.

2

Have you tried the option in MATE Tweak Marco (Compton GPU compositor)?

3

I don’t have nvidia card any more but I used to di this for my debian when I had.
First I would install proprietary nvidia drivers. In Debian you do this with terminal.

To see if this fixes tearing, run in terminal:

nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }"

You don’t even need to restart the web browser to see the results. This will stick on the current session or until the next system reboot.

To make it stick after reboot I would do:

sudo apt update &&  sudo apt install nvidia-xconfig

Then run:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

This creates X configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Edit this file (as root) and in the “Screen” section add next line.

Option  "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }"

Saved and it sticked on reboot.

4

@ClarusAD - FWIW, there is a patch in Marco (not yet released, though) that should fix tearing. However it only works for the nouveau and intel drivers, not the proprietary nvidia one.

1 Like
5

The soluce given by @anon94368460 seems to work fine…
:shamrock:
I’ll test 2 or 3 days before setting the subject as 'solved '.

6

Good to hear that. @ClarusAD

For the sake of people that have that line already and want to fix the tearing, I should also add that the key string to add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf is { ForceCompositionPipeline = On } to the end of the Option “metamodes” line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. That way their custom settings won’t get messed up.
So, for example, this line can look like this:
Option "metamodes" "DVI-I-1: 1920x1200 +1920+0, HDMI-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+120 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }"

7

My screen size is 1920x1080 ; should i replace, from your command, 1200 by 1080 ?
Thank-you

8

@anon94368460 : apt tells me it can’t find the nvidia-xconfig package.
Nerver mind, i’ve done a "startupitems.sh " with the command inside.

9

No, that for people who already have xorg.conf. They should just add { ForceCompositionPipeline = On } at the end of the line.

Well, this is Ubuntu. Deian is a little different. Glad you got it.

10

Thanks, this just worked for me on 17.10