Arch Linux

captainmurphie

Member

Registered: 2010-02-18

Posts: 2

Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

So far, every Nvidia card I've used with Ubuntu, Debian and Arch has had intolerable screen tearing with a compositing manager running, while watching any video. I've installed the proprietary driver from Nvidia on a Debian machine but the screen tearing is still there. The cards I've been using are an 8600GT and a 9600GT.

I've tried xcompmgr, Xfce compositing and Gnome compositing all of which seem to cause the same symptoms.

It seems like I read somewhere that there's a problem with the Nvidia compositing extension or something like that...

Two questions...
1) Do ATI cards tear video with compositing enabled? (I'm hoping they don't...)

2) Is there any way to cure screen tearing with an nvidia card and compositing enabled?

Last edited by captainmurphie (2010-02-22 07:30:57)

thestinger

Package Maintainer (PM)

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2010-01-23

Posts: 478

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

nvidia has way better support than ati for now

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nvidia

everything you need is on that page

the "dri" extension is the one that needs to be disabled, but if you run Xorg -configure and then nvidia-xsettings that will be done for you

I've used a 7900gtx, a 8800gtx and a 260gtx without problems with the proprietary driver, my only complaint is 2d performance (and it would be nice if nvidia open sourced the drivers...)

EDIT: another thing to add - the drivers that you compiled couldn't have been the "nvidia" drivers themselves because they aren't open source - maybe it was nouveau?

Last edited by thestinger (2010-02-22 06:11:09)

captainmurphie

Member

Registered: 2010-02-18

Posts: 2

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

It seems I may have inadvertently confused you. When I said:

I've installed the Nvidia driver from source on a Debian machine...

I meant "source" as in I downloaded the driver from Nvidia's site and ran the shell script.

I should have said:

I've installed the proprietary driver from Nvidia on a Debian machine...

Compositing should be natively enabled with both the Nvidia and ATI proprietary drivers.

My problem isn't getting compositing to work... I have a problem with the tearing a compositing manager such as "xcompmgr" and the many others seem to create while watching any sort of video. I only see tearing when a compositing manager is running.

I would really like to hear from someone with an ATI card and a compositing manager running who can tell me if they experience any tearing while watching video.

smakked

Member

From: Gold Coast , Australia

Registered: 2008-08-14

Posts: 420

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

Thats a weird one i use nvidia and have never had an issue with them, but Ati isnt even stable crashes XOrg all the time. Nvidia drivers are pretty solid.

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Certified Android Junkie
Arch 64

p0ft

Member

From: Brazil

Registered: 2009-02-02

Posts: 8

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

For linux ATI is never a good option, seriously. I`m using a HD4850 right now and I can say ati drivers sucks. (coming from a 8800gt).

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:: i wanna see movies of my dreams

stefanwilkens

Member

From: Enschede, the Netherlands

Registered: 2008-12-10

Posts: 624

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

I'm running an nvidia 6600gt on the reporisory nvidia drivers without issue.

Are you using mplayer with the nvidia anti blitter output?

xvinfo

X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
  Adaptor #0: "NV17 Video Texture"
    number of ports: 32
    port base: 361
[....]
  Adaptor #1: "NV05 Video Blitter"
    number of ports: 32
    port base: 393
[....]

As you can see, we have:
nv17 on ports 361 - 392
nv05 on ports 393 - 424

You can use these blitter free outputs like so:
mplayer <my-nice-video> -vo xv:port=361
or
mplayer <my-nice-video> -vo xv:port=393

or you can choose to use a GUI for mplayer, I believe smplayer has a nice graphical configuration for this.

Finally, you can look at syncing to refresh rates and such. Google should be a worthy resource on that.

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Arch i686 on Phenom X4 | GTX760

Caliburn

Member

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 41

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

ATI Radeon 4670 user here, KDE w/ Arch Linux. While I can't speak for other video cards, this particular card runs absolutely fine using xf86-video-ati and some xorg.conf tweaks. Though I don't play many games, I can tell you Alice runs fine via WINE. As far as OpenGL goes, the screen savers that are supposedly OpenGL work fine, too.

The only performance difference between this card and the 7600GS I was using beforehand that I can tell (minus the speed improvement) is being forced to view videos using the Xvideo driver in KMPlayer. If I view said videos via OpenGL, they display, however widgets on the desktop tend to offer display glitches while the video is ongoing.

I understand there's a good deal of reason for the commenting, and yes, ATI drivers aren't nearly up to par with their Nvidia counterparts, however this doesn't mean some folks aren't having success with the available driver(s) using little effort on their parts. As an ATI user, it'd be nice to see some fellow reports of success with ATI drivers, open source or not.

henkidefix

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2009-01-11

Posts: 38

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

i'm currently using Nvidia 6200 on Archlinux with compiz fusion + cairo-dock and can watch videos allricht
Also been using compiz on ubuntu 7 and suse 10.3 on this same machine and never seen your problem.
Are you shure it's not related to any other hardware ?

by the way: have you disable dri ? how ?
i recall in xorg.conf i needed something like "diable dri" and "disable dri2", have to check.

Last edited by henkidefix (2010-02-24 07:27:17)

jowilkin

Member

Registered: 2009-05-07

Posts: 243

Re: Compositing causes screen tearing with Nvidia, is ATI a better choice?

I use nvidia driver on my HTPC.  I had tearing but solved it by forcing vsync.