Screen tearing reappeared after updating form 19.10 to 20.04 (GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile)

Question

I am using an MSI GL62M 7REX laptop which has a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile graphics card. When I was using Ubuntu 19.10, I was able to deal with screen tearing in the following way:

1. Similarly to this answer, I opened the terminal and typed sudo gedit /etc/default/grub which opened gedit with the following contents:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

2. I edited GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1" and saved the file.

3. Typing nvidia-smi gave back the following details:

Thu May 14 12:39:03 2020       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 435.21       Driver Version: 435.21       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 105...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   51C    P0    N/A /  N/A |    247MiB /  4042MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1180      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            45MiB |
|    0      1717      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           105MiB |
|    0      1972      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                          89MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

4. Now I knew that the main version of my Nvidia driver was 435 which I needed for the next step.

5. According to this instruction (post #5), I created a .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ which contained the following line: options nvidia_435_drm modeset=1.

6. After that, I ran sudo update-initramfs -u and rebooted my machine.

7. sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset then returned Y and the problem was fixed.

After my upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04, these options are still the same. The kernel parameter is still intact and the .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ still exists. Furthermore, the number of the Nvidia driver is still correct but screen tearing reoccurs.

Trying to edit the Nvidia X Server Settings does not help because the look like this:

This was the reason why I tried the other solution described here which worked for me.

What can I do to fix this problem using Ubuntu 20.04?

Answer 1

I was able to solve the problem by selecting the most recent driver 440 (the following picture is from this source; that is why there is a different GeForce GTX model displayed):

Then, I edited the .conf file by replacing options nvidia_435_drm modeset=1 with options nvidia_440_drm modeset=1 and restarted the computer.