Nvidia Screen Tearing on Prime is back

[glitterball]

Unfortunately the dreaded NVidia Screen Tearing is back in 20.04, and the previous fix no longer works.
The previous fix (that worked for me) was to add "options nvidia-drm modeset=1" to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-drm-nomodeset.conf

In NVIDIA X Server Settings, Synchronisation is now off for my displays, with no option to turn it back on.

Any suggestions?

[bradleypariah]

Have you already gone to System Settings > Display & Monitor > Compositor - and selected a "Tearing prevention (vsync)" option? I have mine set to "Full screen repaints."

Also, which Nvidia driver are you running? If you open NVIDIA X Server Settings, go to "X Screen 0" (the number might not be zero) > OpenGL Settings - there should be a checkbox for Sync to VBlank.

The combination of those two things should do the trick.

[glitterball]

Have you already gone to System Settings > Display & Monitor > Compositor - and selected a "Tearing prevention (vsync)" option? I have mine set to "Full screen repaints."

Also, which Nvidia driver are you running? If you open NVIDIA X Server Settings, go to "X Screen 0" (the number might not be zero) > OpenGL Settings - there should be a checkbox for Sync to VBlank.

The combination of those two things should do the trick.

I tried all of that, but unfortunately nothing fixes the issue (using the 390 driver).
I have since found a thread on an Arch forum, where many users are reporting that this issue is back again since the 5.4 kernel:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251032

I also tried KDE Neon today (which uses 5.3) and there is no tearing when using the Nvidia driver.

[bradleypariah]

I tried all of that, but unfortunately nothing fixes the issue (using the 390 driver).
I have since found a thread on an Arch forum, where many users are reporting that this issue is back again since the 5.4 kernel:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251032

I also tried KDE Neon today (which uses 5.3) and there is no tearing when using the Nvidia driver.

What driver comes with Neon? -and what's your hardware? I'm running the 440 driver on 20.04. I have a gtx680.
Is your hardware old? -is that why you're running an older driver?
Have you tried going to System Settings > Driver Manager to get updated?

[glitterball]

What driver comes with Neon? -and what's your hardware? I'm running the 440 driver on 20.04. I have a gtx680.
Is your hardware old? -is that why you're running an older driver?
Have you tried going to System Settings > Driver Manager to get updated?

Same driver with Neon (390) - the hardware is a GeForce GT 635M.
I tried updating to 440, but couldn't get a working desktop with that (ended up starting again after that).

Driver Manager doesn't offer the option of updating to 440 (for good reason it seems).

[bradleypariah]

Are any other drivers in the Driver Manager available? I'm not sure if you've given up at this point, but if you haven't, I would try switching to a different driver.

If that didn't work, and I was in your shoes, I'd probably stay on 19.10 (or Neon) until 20.04.1 comes out, then check back to see if they got it sorted.

[glitterball]

Are any other drivers in the Driver Manager available? I'm not sure if you've given up at this point, but if you haven't, I would try switching to a different driver.

If that didn't work, and I was in your shoes, I'd probably stay on 19.10 (or Neon) until 20.04.1 comes out, then check back to see if they got it sorted.

The only other version was the older 340 version (I think), which has terrible screen tearing.

Yeah, I'll wait - I always try a test install on a removable disk before installing new versions nowadays to avoid these issues.
I think that there's an issue with the Linux 5.4 kernel as others on that Arch forum have said.

[Tanker Bob]

I encountered this on upgrade to 20.04 with the latest 440 driver. After several attempts to mitigate the issue using various settings, including full screen refreshes, I installed the Ubuntu kernel team's 5.6 kernel. It was easy and now the video works perfectly.

Late edit 5/14/2020: The newer 5.6.11 kernel worked better, but did not fix the issue. I ended up going to the open source Nouveau driver for now. No video issues with the Nouveau.

[glitterball]

The only other version was the older 340 version (I think), which has terrible screen tearing.

Yeah, I'll wait - I always try a test install on a removable disk before installing new versions nowadays to avoid these issues.
I think that there's an issue with the Linux 5.4 kernel as others on that Arch forum have said.

Which kernel did you use? Was it the oem one in the repositories?
Either way, the 390 driver is still the recommended one for my hardware.

[glitterball]

This issue (screen tearing) was resolved by some recent updates and Nvidia synchronization is now working again.

There are quite a few bugs still though with display configuration preferences being lost quite frequently.
If this happens (and you have no panel), run the following from the terminal:
kcmshell5 kcm_kscreen