How to get tear-free rendering with nvidia proprietary?

Question

I never experienced tearing before since I was using Ubuntu all the time but recently I have switched to Arch Linux with awesome as my window manager. Since awesome does not use any composite manager I see these annoying glitches while scrolling the web page. I have installed compton and it works but I have some issues with it enabled.

Graphic card: GeForce GTX 670 with proprietary driver (387.34-19)
compton --version: v0.1_beta2.5

compton --daemon --config /dev/null --backend glx

1. Sometimes terminal emulator I use (xfce4-terminal) does not render output until additional keystroke. The issue is described here, here and here.
2. The google chrome context menu sometimes flickers.

Nevertheless, it fixes tearing.

compton --daemon --config /dev/null --backend xrender

This fixes issues described above but tearing itself.

compton --daemon --config /dev/null --backend xr_glx_hybrid

This fixes issue #1 and tearing but issue #2. Moreover, screen flush starts to appear randomly. I have found that I can fix issue #2 by passing --fading option but the latter one is still present.

So, xrender works pretty well since it does not produce new bugs but I do not think it is good decision to investigate to when I have gpu with proprietary drivers. It seems that compton is a bunch of hacks and tricks, I am tired to make it work properly. I have tried xcompmgr and saw no desired effect - there was tearing during scrolling.

Fortunately, there is another solution to make desktop tear-free using ForceCompositionPipeline=On. I have configured my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf properly and everything is perfect except input latency. The mouse pointer has become less responsiveness, more smoothed. Perhaps, the keyboard is too but I am not sure (I mean, it takes more time to print the key I have pressed).

I am looking for any possibility to get rid of tearing. New composite managers as well as proper compton options are acceptable but the solution for latter issue is preferable since I do not actually need all these features like shadow or fading provided by compositors.

Answer 1

I was able to solve these issues. As I said, to fix issue #2, pass --fading option. To increase animation speed or turn it off (set 1) you can pass --fade-in-step and --fade-out-step options. I had screen flush when there was xr_glx_hybrid as backend, so glx is preferable. And I do not know why but I have found that options --xrender-sync and --xrender-sync-fence fix issue #1. Maybe compton uses xrender when glx fails...

Answer 2

I can't comment yet, but thanks a lot for your answer.

You can also add those options in the config file for a more repeatable setup.

backend = "xr_glx_hybrid";
fading = true;
fade-in-step = 0.03; # Choose your own value here
fade-out-step = 0.03; # Same as above
xrender-sync-fence = true;