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adrian_byesterday at 7:12 PM0 repliesview on HN

On my desktop computers and on most of my laptops I have never experienced tearing in X11, at least during the last 25 years, using mostly NVIDIA GPUs, but also Intel GPUs and AMD GPUs.

I have experienced tearing only once, on a laptop about 10 years ago, which used NVIDIA Optimus, i.e. an NVIDIA GPU without direct video output, which used the Intel GPU to provide outputs. NVIDIA Optimus was a known source of problems in Linux and unlike with any separate NVIDIA GPU, which always worked out-of-the-box without any problems for me, with that NVIDIA Optimus I had to fiddle with the settings for a couple of days until I solved all problems, including the tearing problem.

Perhaps Wayland never had tearing problems, but I have used X11 for several decades on a variety of desktops and laptops and tearing has almost never been a problem.

However, most of the time I have used only NVIDIA or Intel GPUs for display and it seems that most complaints about tearing have been about AMD. I have always used and I am still using AMD GPUs too, but I use those for computations, not connected to monitors, so I do not know if they could have tearing problems.