Bug 2196268

Summary:	Screen tearing in fullscreen apps since upgrade to Fedora 38 (GNOME + X11 + Nvidia proprietary drivers)
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Gwendal <ezwen-redhatbugzilla>
Component:	mutter	Assignee:	Florian Müllner <fmuellner>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	38	CC:	fmuellner, gnome-sig, jadahl, otaylor, philip.wyett, scott, walters
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Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Gwendal 2023-05-08 14:06:32 UTC

When I run a fullscreen app displaying fast horizontal motions, I observe significant visually unpleasant screen tearing.

Examples of cases where this is visible:
- When I run the Kodi media center and scroll an horizontal list of movies (this animates movie posters smoothly going from right to left)
- When I run a video game with fast motions (note: the problem appears despite "VSync" being enabled in the game, which in principle should most tearing problems)
- When I watch a video in fullscreen (VLC or Kodi) which contains fast motions

I run Fedora 38 with GNOME, X11, and Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Display an video/app/video game in fullscreen
2. Trigger horizontal motions
Actual Results:
Screen tearing

Expected Results:
No screen tearing

- This problem started appearing after I upgraded to Fedora 38.

- This problem does *not* appear when I try to reproduce the issue outside of GNOME, with a raw OpenBox session. This eliminates the kernel and the drivers as possible causes, and points GNOME components as more plausible culprits.

- The problem disappears if I open nvidia-settings, go to "X Server Display Configuration", click on "Advanced", and tick "Force Full Composition Pipeline". However, I never had to do that in Fedora 37, and I don't have to do that in Fedora 38 with Openbox (see items above).

- My system should be up-to-date, here are the version numbers of possibly relevant components:

* GNOME core packages (including mutter and gnome-shell) : 44.1-1.fc38
* kernel : 6.2.14-300.fc38.x86_64
* nvidia drivers : 530.41.03-1.fc38

Comment 1 Scott Brown 2023-05-14 00:19:29 UTC

I produce this newly also since F38 upgrade. Also run X11. Intel graphics. The tearing was not present under F37. The tearing is not present if I switch to Wayland. So must be related to the compositor.

Comment 2 Gwendal 2023-07-17 17:17:47 UTC

Still happening with the following package versions:

  * GNOME core packages (including mutter and gnome-shell) : 44.2-2.fc38
  * kernel : 6.3.11-200.fc38
  * nvidia drivers : 535.54.03-1.fc38