Stop tearing pictures with an Nvidia card

[DeMus]

When you use an Nvidia card and you watch movies on your PC you probably know the phrase "Tearing pictures". These are pictures which are divided into two parts. The top part shows a different, newer, frame than the bottom one. Especially when there is a lot of horizontal movement in the film you see that the two half pictures don't match: a person walking from left to right is a bit further to the right on the top frame than on the bottom one. This is terrible to look at. Happily there is a solution, one which comes directly from the helpdesk of Nvidia.

After installing the driver you open the Nvidia X server settings program which can be found in the system part of your Start-menu.

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In the left column click on the second line: X server display configuration.
Bottom right you find a way to save the settings into the xorg.conf file. Do that.

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In the Save X configuration window type:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Remark: X11 is written with a capital letter X

Click on Save. Since the file has to be saved on the system partition you will need to type your password to get root privileges.
Should this not work, change the file name into:

/home/<username>/xorg.conf and save it to your home folder.
Remark: <username> is of course your own username

Close the Nvidia program.
Open a terminal and either type:

sudo <name texteditor> /etc/X11/xorg.conf, when the file could be saved in the Nvidia program, or

<name texteditor> ~/xorg.conf when you could not save it in the correct place but used your home folder.
Remark: <name texteditor> should be exchanged with the actual name of the texteditor in your version of Mint, kate for KDE, gedit for Cinnamon and XFCE, or pluma for Mate.


Almost at the end of the textfile there are some options mentioned in the section "Screen"
One line reads:

Option "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0"

Change this line into:

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

click on Save and exit the text-editor.

When it was possible to save the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 you can now reboot to make sure that the system is using the changed xorg.conf file.

When you had to save the file in your user area you still need to move the file to /etc/X11.
Still in the terminal you type:

sudo mv ~/xorg.conf /etc/X11

Now you can reboot and when everything worked it is now possible to watch movies without tearing pictures.