pecualir tearing issue, nvidia gtx960

neo_cool_XIIK · 05-29-2015, 05:53 PM

Hey there, folks!

A few months ago I set up a new rig with a geforce gtx960 video card. I'm running xubuntu 15.04, upgraded from 14.10. Even thought performances has been great across the board, from the very beginning I had tearing issues. Nothing's changed isnce the upgrade. The two instances in which I've been unable to resolve the issues are in old loki game ports and video playback. mplayer behaves rather strangely with xv and vdpau. With VDPAU, playback is fine if I play a video file (regardless of file size and resolution). If I play a file after flash has been activated (e.g. in youtube) or after file is already playing in youtube, there will be one very prominent horizontal tear in the top portion of the screen. With xv, that tear appears in video playback outright. The very same tear appears in loki ports, like Unreal Tournament. Playing around tonight, I removed libSDL-1.1.so from ut's system folder, and symlinked /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libSDL-1.2.so.0 instead. The tear is now gone in ut. So I'm guessing the tear in mplayer has something to do with overlay issues? The driver not accelerating the second video or something? Not really too much of a practical problem, but really puzzling.I'm really at a loss here ..Any thoughts would be appreciated.

ondoho · 05-30-2015, 06:56 AM

do you have tearing issues everywhere?
maybe hardware acceleration is not enabled.
there was some command to check this, maybe with glxinfo.

which driver are you using?
can you post

Code:

lspci -vk | grep -iA22 vga

neo_cool_XIIK · 05-30-2015, 02:31 PM

My bad for not mentioning! I'm using the 352 proprietary blob from xedgers. Have been upgrading steadily from 346, no change in results. Acceleration is indeed enabled, and performance is great. There is some 2D tearing on the desktop, but it's insignificant. The issues I mentioned above are much more prominent. Here's the output:

Code:

lspci -vk | grep -iA22 vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1401 (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 3690
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 34
	Memory at f6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
	I/O ports at e000 [size=128]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at f7000000 [disabled] [size=512K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia

01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0fba (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 3690
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
	Memory at f7080000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Motherboard
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 30
	I/O ports at d000 [size=256]
	Memory at f7100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]

ondoho · 05-30-2015, 02:42 PM

re-reading your first post, the problem occurs only with mplayer, right?

i don't have a direct answer, but i gave up on mplayer some time ago - when mpv became good enough.
so if you can install a fairly recent version of mpv, try that.

you can also try with ffplay (part of ffmpeg), although it's not meant as an actual media player.

Head_on_a_Stick · 05-30-2015, 02:47 PM

Does this fix your issue:

Code:

nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"

If so, add this line to your xorg configuration file in the "Screen" section:

Code:

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

If you don't have an Xorg configuration file, you can create one using `nvidia-xconfig`

neo_cool_XIIK · 05-30-2015, 03:14 PM

Playback in mpv is fine, since it uses OpenGl for output. I get no tearing in mplayer using opengl as well. The problem is only present with xv (always) and vdapu (when playing more than one video) output. What makes me wonder about this is the very specific nature of the tear that appears in both case. Same single spot at identical resolutions. Tearing in Quake3, Doom3, Quake4, HL2 etc was fixed by making sure that vsync is on, but the previously mentioned top-tearing seems to be a separate issue.

---------- Post added 05-30-15 at 08:15 PM ----------

Thanks, will give that a try and report back asap.

neo_cool_XIIK · 05-30-2015, 03:22 PM

That seems to do it, yes O_o. Thanks a bunch! Would you care to elaborate on what exactly the issue is? I've been using nvidia cards back to an FX5500 with linux, and this is the first time I've encountered this problem with the proprietary drivers.

Head_on_a_Stick · 05-30-2015, 03:30 PM

I will be totally honest here: I haven't a clue, I've never used an NVIDIA card...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...0_series_cards

ArchWiki rocks!

neo_cool_XIIK · 05-30-2015, 03:35 PM

Ah well

Thanks anyway

I'll hold off marking as solved for a while in case anybody else has any ideas; hope the moderators don't mind!