Wow,
I thought I’d never experience this issue and now I have it (for the first time in my life actually).
mplayer -vo xv (which is a default) and -vo vdpau both exhibit noticeable video tearing in full screen mode.
mplayer -vo gl doesn’t have this problem (maybe because newer NVIDIA drivers have VSync turned on by default).
This didn’t happen on the same PC with 8800GT GPU which is kinda strange and almost impossible to believe into - yet tearing is very noticeable. I don’t run any compositing managers and I don’t have any desktop effects enabled.
This issue affects only those users who don’t run any form of compositing display manager (if you have one, just enable Vsync and you’ll be fine).
Please advise.
Update 2013-06-17: this issue affects Adobe Flash Player videos, VLC and other media players, tearing can also be seen when scrolling pages in Mozilla Firefox.
Update 2013-09-24: Aaron Plattner says this issue cannot and won’t be fixed, due to the Kepler architecture.
Update 2013-10-22: Try the ForceCompositionPipeline and/or ForceFullCompositionPipeline MetaMode attributes. They are supposed to fix this issue, but mind that they cause significant performance degradation in games. See Chapter 12. Configuring Multiple Display Devices on One X Screen for details.
Update 2013-11-27: if you want to fix tearing temporarily without changing any configuration files, use this command:
nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="DVI-I-1: 1920x1200 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }"
You can find out your output device(s) by running
xrandr | grep " connect"
Beware that ForceCompositionPipeline makes Wine desktop (non-gaming) applications unusable - they become extremely slow and sluggish.
Update 2014-01-03: Here’s a quick test to test tearing:
Make this video full screen and check if the vertical line is untorn.
Update 2014-01-04: Windows XP and Windows 7 (not running Aero) users are also affected. There’s no solution for Windows XP (videos playback can be fixed by using MPC-HC though) and for Windows 7 you have to enable Aero. I suspect Maxwell will have the same issue since non-compositing desktops are a thing of the past and Windows XP won’t be supported for Maxwell at all.
nvidia-bug-report.7z (47 KB)