Fullscreen YouTube video tearing and no nvidia-settings to help

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

I have followed these tutorials on the EndeavourOS website:


I installed the dkms nvidia driver with the nvidia-installer-dkms.

Everything worked fine I guess. I have no v-sync problems on the desktop environment, running apps, moving windows around or even playing full-hd videos on VLC.

But when I play YouTube videos in full screen, I get some very noticeable screen tearing issues.

I tried following the arch wiki’s “nvidia vsync troubleshoot” guide as well as setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true inf firefox’s about:config. Nothing worked!
I also noticed that the nvidia-settings program always answers with ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system even though I think the nvidia drivers are installed.

How do I get proper vsync on youtube?

Thank you for your time, bellow I’ll post some useful info:

$ dkms status                                                           
broadcom-wl, 6.30.223.271, 5.8.14-arch1-1, x86_64: installed
nvidia, 455.28, 5.8.14-arch1-1, x86_64: installed

$ lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 (rev 04)
	DeviceName:  Onboard IGD
	Subsystem: Dell Device 07d1
--
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce 940MX] (rev a2)
	Subsystem: Dell Device 07d1
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia

$ nvidia-settings --query CurrentMetaMode
ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system
ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system

$ neofetch                                                      
OS: EndeavourOS Linux x86_64 
Host: Latitude 5580 
Kernel: 5.8.14-arch1-1 
Uptime: 31 mins 
Packages: 1168 (pacman) 
Shell: zsh 5.8 
Resolution: 1920x1080 
DE: Budgie (git-10b814fa62bf774ca48e 
WM: Mutter(Budgie) 
Theme: Arc-Dark [GTK2/3] 
Icons: Arc-X-P [GTK2/3] 
Terminal: mate-terminal 
Terminal Font: Monospace 10 
CPU: Intel i7-7820HQ (8) @ 3.900GHz 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 630 
Memory: 2187MiB / 15647MiB 

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "intel"
  Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
  Option "TearFree" "true"
  Option  "TripleBuffer" "true"
EndSection

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
Section "Device"
    Identifier "Nvidia Card"
    Driver "nvidia"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option "NoLogo" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "nvidia"
        Option         "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"

        Option          "TripleBuffer"                  "on"
        Option          "AllowIndirectGLXProtocol"      "off"
EndSection
1 Like
2

When I get home I might be able to help with this. FF + YT on Linux is kinda a dumpster fire for Vsync

3

Which browser are you using? Firefox, at the moment, is not ideal to watch videos, like @Echoa already said. Just try, for testing purposes, one of the chromium-based browsers or Epiphany if you’re really against Chromium-based, though it will not show DRM videos. (Netflix etc.)

4

I just realized i think youre running a prime system like a laptop no?

You might need a different driver/driver setup and might need to force firefox to use a specific GPU. Vsync when you have multiple GPU can be weird, check firefox about:support to see what GPU its trying to use.

5

not sure if OP is still looking at this thread or not but i found what might be going on

so i installed regular firefox and for the life of me couldnt get screen tearing to stop on the plain jane version

I havent used that in a while what i use it the Developer edition and this is how i fix it

go to about:config
change these options

gfx.webrender.all = true
layers.acceleration.force-enabled = true

you may need to reboot after these as ive had it not work till a reboot after first setting them but ymmv

6

put these settings to /etc/enviroment and restart

__GL_YIELD=“USLEEP”
KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1
KWIN_USE_BUFFER_AGE=0

This will take care of all tearing in kde plasma

7

OP is on budgie which I think is some variant of mutter

I’m on gnome and previous post works for me

8

Does this work for Intel graphics too? I notice screen tearing on Intel, but no with prime render offload with nvidia.

9

I never had intel graphics, but give it a try

10

Doesn’t seem to work for Intel. Getting bad tearing just by dragging windows.

11

Too bad, but now we know

for intel you could set vsync from auto to “full screen repaints” in compositor settings in the system settings of kde…

12

you might need to enable tear free if using xorg on intel

13

@Echoa I am using a Prime laptop with Intel and Nvidia gpus and I have installed the new BPSWM version of eos and using the lightDM. I am facing the same issue. I primarily use Google Chrome as my browser but faced the same tearing issues when I tried playing the video in Firefox. Any suggestions?

14

I switched from hybrid mode to Nvidia only mode and I do not notice much tearing. So I switched to integrated only to see if there is an issue there and the video tearing returned. Not only on youtube but also if I scroll a webpage, I seem to notice some tearing on the screen with integrated graphics. So for the time being I am only using the Nvidia GPU.

15

Im not sure tbh, Ive never used BSPWM or any other tiling WM but you might try enabling webrender and making sure that xorg has the tear free option enabled. Thats my best guess for why the integrated might be having more issues and webrender in FF tends to do better with frame times and sync.

16

Thanks for your reply. It would be nice if you could add a little more details on how to do these things. Would save me a lot of Googling!

17

Are you able to turn off hardware acceleration in the Chrome browser?

Edit: In the Settings tab, scroll down to the bottom and then click “Advanced.” Scroll down to the System section and find the “Use hardware acceleration when available” setting. Toggle the switch to the “Off” position and then click “Relaunch” to apply the change

18

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_WebRender_compositor

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics#Tearing

@KaiWizardly you dont need to do much googling, just use the best wiki out there, next time around try going to the Arch wiki for a search first :slightly_smiling_face: you can find lots of answers or things to try there