Monday, June 17, 2013

Fixing nVidia Graphics Tearing on LinuxMint Cinnamon

So, after installing an nVidia GTX 650TI a while back, I put up with tearing in pretty much all applications because it was easy to install and get going.

But eventually I got sick of it and tried to fix it. After trying about every fix I could find, I jumped to a different distro (from Xubuntu 12.10 to Mint 15) in the hope that might have some effect. It didn't, but I re-tried a fix I thought I'd already tried, and found it eliminated the tearing 100%.

The fix is to add this to the /etc/environment file:

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True

This is using the nVidia proprietary driver 304.88. Hope to confirm on other Xubuntu systems whether this fix also works.

Update 20 June 2013:

Unfortunately, the fix only seems to work in Mint/Cinnamon. Title updated to reflect this.

3 comments:

  1. The visitor from the other post on this topic here. I've reinstalled the machine with this card and found the Fun with Screen Tearing again. I'm no longer using Cinnamon, so this fix stopped working.

    However, running 'nvidia-settings' to get the settings console, navigate to [GPU name] > PowerMizer > Preferred Mode. Change Preferred Mode to "Prefer Maximum Peformance". Screw the power saving. Video tearing while scrolling heavy webpages has disappeared.

    Cheers, mate.

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    Replies
    1. Hi! I never had much luck with changing the Mizer modes -- it never seemed to do anything for me -- but good to hear you go it going :D

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  2. This guy solution is the only one that worked for me!
    http://mondotech.blogspot.ro/2015/01/fix-screen-tearing-issues-with-mint-17.html

    ReplyDelete