NVIDIA Posts Latest PRIME Sync Patches On Road To Better Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Posts Latest PRIME Sync Patches On Road To Better Support

Alex Goins of NVIDIA has spent the past several months working on PRIME synchronization support to fix tearing when using this NVIDIA-popular multi-GPU method. The latest patches were published this week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-PRIME-Sync-V3

[rob11311]

Ah the power & flexibility of FOSS, Nvidia staff can submit patches to Intel's driver to the benefit of Intel & their customers

[mannerov]

What is funny is that intel team promised two years ago to add support for dma-buf fences. This is needed for tear-free PRIME and DRI_PRIME.

And then a few months ago, still nothing, and that Nvidia dev had to implement it for the subcase he was interested in (ie fullscreen buffer/pageflip). This was merged recently.
These patches seemed quite short, for sure intel devs could have done them in no time. I'm disappointed.

EDIT: also for people wondering what these (not yet merged) xorg patches are about:
This is for when you drive all rendering on the nvidia card, and you use the intel card just for the display.
This is different to the DRI_PRIME open driver approach where you render on the intel card the desktop, and selected applications get rendered on the dedicated card. These xorg patches are not for this approach.

[bug77]

Probably unrelated, but tearing became unbearable with latest plasma 5.5 on a laptop with both intel and nvidia graphics. However the simple solution was to disable kwin's "smart" refresh and force full-screen repaint. Probably not the best option for gaming, but for my work laptop there are no downsides (that I have noticed so far).

Edit: Scratch that, the tearing seems to come back between reboots. Now trying adding a couple of environment variables instead (sthis supposedly works better).

[SethDusek]

Probably not the best option for gaming, but for my work laptop there are no downsides (that I have noticed so far).

As far as I know, the tearing isn't fixable if you're on nvidia in your optimus setup. If you're on intel, it's fine, but on nvidia there's no vsync or synchronization. It's why I switch to intel when watching a movie

Also, thanks Michael for covering the pull request I sent you

[bug77]

As far as I know, the tearing isn't fixable if you're on nvidia in your optimus setup. If you're on intel, it's fine, but on nvidia there's no vsync or synchronization. It's why I switch to intel when watching a movie

Also, thanks Michael for covering the pull request I sent you

There may be no vsync, but having nvidia selected as primary and forcing full screen repaints, there's no visible tearing anymore. Keep in mind this a work laptop, I don't watch movies.

[andre30correia]

waiting this for years

[tancrackers]

I have the GTX-960M to be a good balance between performance and $$.
I have a Sager NP7255 (Clevo 155RD).

[Nightbane112]

Probably unrelated, but tearing became unbearable with latest plasma 5.5 on a laptop with both intel and nvidia graphics. However the simple solution was to disable kwin's "smart" refresh and force full-screen repaint.

Apperently, you could try and enable DRI 3 for the intel GPU ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...e_3_.28DRI3.29 ) . I had enabled mine ( Intel HD Graphics 4000) for the past few weeks. No tearing whatsoever using Kwin on Intel unless I disable vsync.

[Kamikaze]

Excellent news. Hope this gets merged soon and that the bug affecting xorg-server 1.18, nvidia proprietary drivers and this configuration gets fixed because it is currently broken: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47151?project=1