Screen/Video tearing 7xx(Kepler), 9xx(Maxwell), 10xx(Pascal) in almost all applications, including desktop

when decoding in hw and scaling in hw, flash plugin uses vdpau for both; that’s why VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY has effect on flash plugin too.
As said, you need to export it system wide.

And about the compositor, you can use compton with kwin(3 and 4) too.

Oops, for some reasons I thought compositors are an alternative to usual window manager so they cannot run together but then I realized you were right (I now remember I ran kwin3 along with xcompmgr).

I will try compton soon and report back if it makes any difference.

Bump number 1.

I’ve just discovered that smooth scrolling in Firefox is also affected by this issue.

yes it is, and also on some fade in menu like at www.heise.de (hover mouse over the “heise online” at top mid and see overlayed menu fading in, short before its finished you see a moment a “horizontal line” in the mid.

I still believe it is related to / caused by adaptive sync enabled in Kepler. Just my guess.

Adaptive Vsync if I’m not mistaken is only enabled for OpenGL applications.

If one doesn’t run a composite environment that syncs to vblank in some way,
then having tearing across all but vsynced opengl/xv/vdpau applications is the expected Xorg behaviour (and video drivers can’t do nothing about that).

So, smooth scrolling in firefox is expected to tears when no compositing is active, and as firefox doesn’t use a single opengl surface to draw the webpage, then even activating HW acceleration is useless (this is my personal finding).

This is the birdie case; can’t say about Al777

You can blame your video driver when you have tearing in vdpau,xv or opengl.

You could be right, but on the same PC with absolutely the same software I had no tearing at all when I had a 8800GT installed.

It is strange, as far as i know, Xorg does not provide a way to vsync applications without using compositing.

Yet I’ve never had any problems with tearing for the past 15 years. Until I upgraded to a 660 GTX of course.

I owned Riva TNT 2, GeForce MX 440, GeForce 7600GT, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 8800GT - all of them with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

just to add and emphasize on it: I also never had a problem with tearing, from my Riva TNT, GeForce2, FX5800, 8800 GTX and also my GTX 460 untill last October. Now with the GTX 660 Ti it hits me 1st time, and its awful. Especially because the tearing has a very remarkably pattern like “sawtooth”. It is eye catching more than just a single line tearing.

@birdie:
"Adaptive Vsync if I’m not mistaken is only enabled for OpenGL applications. "

—> Yes, correct. But for me almost everything uses OpenGL: the KDE compositor, Firefox (I use Seamonkey but it is same basis)… But even vlc playing video using xv is some how badly affected. Flash some times, especially if i have more than one instance of flash player in tabs of browser. Mplayer with VDPAU works best until, least effects if some visible there.

I really urge one from Nvidia to comment here. As i feel wasting my money with the Kepler card, and I have found none of a workaround. That it is adaptive sync is my only guess by logic, as it is implemented firstly in Kepler. And it may be not only an issue of the driver, maybe it is a problem caused by many causes, but without the help from Nvidia we can’t get around this.

Aaron, any comments?

Here comes a bump.

Greetings to all from Zlatoust Russia.

My system is:
ArchLinux x86 3.9.3-1
Desktop environment - xfce4 compiz
cpu: Athlon 4000
mb: GA-M56-S3
memory: 2GB DDR2 800Mhz
Video: gigabyte 650GTX 1024MB

I’m having the same problem as you, after replacing 8600Gt on gigabyte 650GTX 1024MB.
8600Gt me all happy - no problems with tearing, with video playback.
In addition to the basic problems of tearing, there is one - the video is played, as it were choppy, as if the speed of the video is not 24 frames per second, but 15-20, or as if some frames are skipped, this is not tearing’s problem - the screen is not divided into 2 or more parts, but the picture is twofold - it happens when you move the camera along a stationary object (edges of object become x2 x3 x4 and shaking when moving the camera).
The problem of tearing when playing video appears when using “xv” when, “vdpau” and “gl” - it is not practical speciation, but still it is.
In games tearing almost not visible, or not at all.
Honestly, I was going to return the video card to the store because it defective, but as it turned out - this is a common problem.
On this issue, I will report on the website of the store, where he bought a graphics card - (a chain of supermarkets selling at all Russia) to warn customers that they may have a problem.

Hi, I have the same problem with tearing on GTX 670 in video, KDE and games under wine since I upgraded from 9600GT nearly a year ago.

Screen tears apart at 1/5-1/4 from top edge regardless “sync to vblank” was enabled or not. However, I can see with WINEDEBUG=“-all,fps” and glxgears that it limits the FPS to refresh rate of a monitor (2560x1600 @ 59.86Hz). Tearing is visible on desktop environment with compositing and vsync when I move windows or scrolling. It is also noticeble in games under wine with compositing disabled but not that bad as in mplayer and youtube.

The only solution to watch video without tearing on GTX 670 was to set VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=0 and disable compositing in kwin, but it doesn’t apply color and gamma correction from nvidia-settings that way.

I just checked that my old 9600GT works fine without tearing effects on this system with all the same settings. Hopefully there will be a fix for 600 series after all the year passed.

Debian 3.8.13
KDE 4.10.2
X Server 1.12.4

I solved the problem of the return of the video card to the store.
I took my money back.

Wow, some people actually do it. My utter respect.

But maybe just maybe we’ll see fixed drivers soon - too bad NVIDIA doesn’t even want to admit all Kepler GPUs have this issue [under Linux].

[b]NVIDIA,

I also see tearing in Mozilla Firefox when scrolling web pages and when playing Flash videos in all web browsers.[/b]

The fact that it hasn’t been recognized at all by a dev makes me think they 1) know there’s a problem and 2) there’s no way to fix it.

Either way… I’ve seen a lot of people post here about this but nobody has taken the step to simply try Ubuntu 13.04 + the experimental compiz PPA to see if the problem can be isolated down to the hardware or the software. I mention this because I believe that version of compiz is the only Linux software that utilizes the new GLX extension to control tearing. But I could be wrong.

First of all I want to say that I am very saddened by what happened.
I’ve always been a fan of Nvidia, and buying only their cards.
I chose this card a few months, comparing its specs on Nvidia’s site.
But buying and seeing how it works in Linux - I was in shock.
No advice from the internet and this site has helped me solve my problem.
After reading this thread, I was even more shocked - people bought the cards for $ 200-300 and the problem has not been resolved within six months.
Representatives of Nvidia, instead of giving links to the FAQ (preferably in my own language) - said “turn off ‘this’ and do not use.”
Maybe the problem is easily solved, can I have such a configuration of Linux, but I have not heard a single board of representatives from Nvidia.
I would agree that my computer, or my linux blame for tearing if Nvidia would offer download live-cd which are 100% working without tearing, so you can check and see who is to blame for tearing.
I managed to reduce tearing in video playback to a minimum, but he was tearing it - made my eyes hurt after a few minutes of viewing.
I want to add that in Windows there is no tearing, as in win xp sp2 and in win7 sp1 - it’s all the problem of Linux, drivers under Linux, and apparently adaptive vertical synchronization technology, which can not be disabled in Linux.

I want to gather a group of people who are faced with the problem of tearing that Nvidia did not want to deal with last year, and apply for Nvidia to court for:

  1. False advertising, which states that the 6xx series cards use the technology, which eliminates tearing even better, but in reality - in Linux tearing it became impossible to eliminate.
  2. For the imposition of adaptive technology vertical sync, which can not be disabled in Linux.
  3. For non-pecuniary damage - I bought a card to enjoy the pleasure of playing games, watching videos, from the contemplation of the effects compiz-fusion, but instead I earned a nervous breakdown trying to resolve an issue tearing.
    But, unfortunately, I think that nothing will come of it: (

That’s not even funny - Aaron regularly visits this forum, yet he’s never left a message in this topic.

This issue reminds me of NVIDIA 8000/9000 Series Performance Issues - which wasn’t acknowledged by NVIDIA for months and took over half a year to be resolved.