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Workspace switching causes screen tearing

asked Dec 14 '12

aliasbind gravatar image

updated Dec 14 '12

Considering I have a terminal occupying a whole workspace and another terminal in another, switching quickly between these two workspaces will cause screen tearing with some white rectangles "blending in" with the terminal background color.

I have an Nvidia GTS 450 graphics card, with the Nvidia driver version 310.19. I've also set up the following attributes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option         "Composite" "Disable"
Option         "TrippleBuffering"    "true"
Option         "DynamicTwinView"     "false"
Option         "UseEvents"           "true"
Option         "FlatPanelProperties" "Scaling = Native"

While this may not be an issue with i3, I was wondering if there was something that could be done in order to wait for all the windows to be rendered in a workspace before switching to it so that no more tearing will appear. This seems to occur also with the Nouveau driver.


Later Edit:

Tearing does not occur when using xterm or urxvt, however. It seems that this happens on xfce4-terminal and gnome-terminal, therefore a possible solution will be to change the terminal emulator. I guess I answered my own question.

2 answers

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answered May 30 '14

AladW gravatar image

updated Oct 11 '15

Michael gravatar image

For me it only happens when switching with the mouse (intel E3-1200). Terminal emulator is lxterminal

also see: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/661

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answered Dec 14 '12

Michael gravatar image

In my experience, any form of tearing/lags/corruption occuring in i3 was caused by faulty graphic drivers and/or graphics hardware.

I have never once heard of a problem with Intel graphic cards, so I recommend these.

I am not aware of anything we can do in i3 to fix this from our side, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do…

Comments

Thank you for your quick answer. It seems that there is no tearing with most applications that I tried until now, except for those two given in my post above (`gnome-terminal` and `xfce4-terminal`).

aliasbind gravatar imagealiasbind (Dec 14 '12)edit

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Asked: Dec 14 '12

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Last updated: Oct 11