Screen artifacts, particularly when scrolling through a webpage or document

Question

When scrolling through a webpage or document, I get "artifacts", for lack of a better word. Part of the document will stay in the same spot and I wont be able to read what is under it. Since this is hard to describe, I've included two images to show what I mean. Although both of these are from firefox, this also occurs in the pdf reader that comes with Ubuntu. If I take a screenshot, the screen will abruptly fix itself before the picture is taken, so I took a picture of it with a camera.

Example 1

Example 2

You can see that in both of these a part of the text repeats itself and is abruptly cut off by the rest of the page. This also occurs in gedit; when I edit a line, sometimes it will not update other lines until I save the document.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 using nvidia-current for my driver. My video card is a Nvidia Quadro NVS 110m, which I believe is similar to the Nvidia Go 7300. I know there were some issues with compiz and this set of GPUs on the current drivers for 11.10, but I don't know if that has anything to do with this. It occurs on both nvidia-current and nvidia-current-updates.

Thank you for your time!

Solution 1

I did have the same problem and found a blog post describing a workaround for this problem. In short: install and open "CompizConfig Settings Manager" and under "Utilities" > "Workarounds" enable "force syncronization between X and GLX". That fixed it for me...

Solution 2

I had the same problem, and finally found a solution by using bumblebee.

Here is the best tutorial I found: https://askubuntu.com/a/36936

I hope this helps.

Comments

[Nimble]

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me. Did you just have to exit CCSM and Firefox, or did you restart your computer?

[Jan-Pieter]

Meh. This seemed to work after enabling the synchronization, but after a reboot I'm still seeing the described artifacts (and the sychrnonization is still enabled) :( Back to Google... If I find something I will let you know.

[Nimble]

I'm not sure how this will help me. My video card doesn't use Optimus (as far as I can tell). The only GPU on the board is the NVS 110m. Ubuntu can detect it fine and the nvidia drivers are not having any strange problems aside from this strange tearing. In Ubuntu 11.10, I used the Nvidia-173 driver and had no problems so I'm fairly certain that this is not the issue. I'm not too excited about uninstalling my drivers and installing some software that isn't even marketed as a solution to my problem.

[Sébastien Barbieri]

I'm now using nouveau open source driver and everything is fine and smooth.

[Melebius]

If your answer is essentially a referral to another question, it would be better to flag this question as a duplicate of the other once you earned 15 reputation. If you have the reputation, don't forget to vote for the answer(s) there that you found useful!