Three years in I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where are the driver issues? I'm certain it was like a law of physics in Linux, but somehow, not this time, not for me?
I can't watch a video on Youtube without substantial tearing on Firefox or Chrome. I've followed close to 20 guides and tried a number of drivers which all fail provide any benefit.
Running glxgears will run at 7400FPS, with minor tearing. My monitors don't have FreeSync or whatever it's called since they're pretty old (over 10 years).
Since most guides are as helpful as "type this into a console" - I haven't learnt anything while trying these fixes.
edit: I tried to install the newest drivers (19.50), and they fail to install with build errors
since I had to uninstall the old ones (19.20) I'm now running Polaris10? drivers by accident, and the tearing issue seems to have disappeared. I have no idea if these are less performant, but they are sufficient for my needs.
(I don't see an option for it in the Nvidia X Server Settings app.)
Note, it is not saved during a reboot unless you click 'Save to X Configuration File' and then save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf for most distros.
Also, many distros have partial v-sync of some sort on. For most it isn't noticeable, but for many desktops it causes the screen to run at an effective 59 instead of 60fps (or that is what it looks like to me, non-scientific here), so it can be beneficial to look up how to turn off vsync on your distro. Eg, I'm on Mint so for me it's General Settings -> VSync method -> None. For most people, this is not a noticeable change.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Tear_free_render...