Workspace switching causes screen tearing

aliasbind
1 ●1 ●1 ●3

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.

add a comment

2 answers

Sort by » oldest newest most voted

answered May 30 '14

AladW
1 ●1

updated Oct 11 '15

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

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

add a comment

answered Dec 14 '12

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

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 (Dec 14 '12)edit

add a comment

Workspace switching causes screen tearing

2 answers

Comments

Question Tools

Stats

Related questions