I’ve been distro-hopping recently and have had a hell of a time nailing down a tear-free configuration. For a while, I was convinced that my issues were hardware related (I have an Nvidia gtx 1080 using proprietary drivers and two 4k monitors), but I think it may actually be an issue with Firefox and youtube specifically.
Using this video to test for screen tearing issues, I found that the same video works correctly on Chromium. I would prefer to use Firefox if possible, so I was wondering if anyone has had a similar issue and might know of a fix (most of the other posts I’ve found seem to be more related to Nvidia driver issues).
Strangely, I am also unable to install extensions for Chromium through the Google web store (it just gets stuck on “checking” after I press the button to “Add to Chrome”), so I am not sure that switching to Chromium would be a viable option for me any way…
your compositor/DE matters as much as the drivers in my experience, not sure about firefox specifically, but I don’t experience tearing in the KDE compositor or the most current compiz. no idea about unity, but since it’s a mutter plugin IIRC, this fix should work there too:
more info about compositors here:
you can also try
nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"
if it really is JUST firefox, you can try
about:support > and see what the compositing mode is under graphics, then set layers.acceleration.force-enabled in about:config
AFAIK Unity uses Compiz for compositing, and I have played around with the “CompizConfigSettingManager” to no avail. However, in this case, I think the compositor may not be the issue since Chromium is able to play the video correctly without any tearing whatsoever…
I currently have the “force full composition pipeline” setting in my xorg.conf. Not quite sure what you mean by “OTMC” fix? Is that the Gnome shell extension that you posted?
I’m currently looking at the about:config options now.
Yeah, about:support is reporting “basic” for compositing. Interestingly, “layers.acceleration.disabled” is listed as modified and set to “true,” which is not a change that I ever made…
Edit: Oops, I had forgotten that I disabled hardware acceleration while trying to fix the tearing issue. That is was that setting was switched on.
I’ll try disabling that and enabling “layers.acceleration.force-enabled.” Is that the setting that corresponds to OMTC?