@KarthikUpadhya I admire your determination to keep trying things. I see same troubles on Dell Precision 5510. Lets compare notes
The tearing and distortion with the Nvidia card is much worse on an external monitor than it is on the laptop's builtin display. Do you see the same difference?
I see no benefit in Bumblebee/Optimus. Maybe the MS Windows driver is further toward the goal. This post makes me think there is some hope yet from Nvidia: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/957814/linux/prime-and-prime-synchronization/.
I see the tearing when scrolling web in Firefox, not just in movies. The tearing looks like a rolling pin filled with water is horizontal across the middle of the page. On an HDMI-external monitor, the tearing is pie shaped polygons.
There are quite a few webpages with tips, such as 1) make sure nvidia is on max performance (I think this does help) 2) turn on sync to vblank 3) turn on pipeline (http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/got-tearing-with-proprietary-nvidia-try-this) 4) use a compositing window manager.
I think 1) helps. 2) is missing from nvidia-settings now, but it is an adjustment in some window managers (KDE). 3) has no effect, but I did not try hard because the first time I did it, it caused the black screen of death and I had a hard time escaping.
I've experimented with these things a lot and I can say for sure your desktop framework--the window manager and compositor--make a huge difference. Right now I like XFCE4 as desktop, and I was testing settings and was able to make the computer almost useless by turning off the compositor in XFWM4. If I do that, then the Geeqie image viewer has a really bad "torn to black rectangles" appearance when images scroll up and down.
I suggest you consider installing KDE and see if their compositing is better.
Supposing this is going in the right direction, I find a post that matches my best guess, which is that the 100s of little adjustments we find in the network are not in the core of the problem, and adopting better compositing will fix. Look at this one: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/543305/linux/screen-video-tearing-gtx6xx-7xx-kepler-9xx-maxwell-in-almost-all-applications-including-desktop/post/4374890/#4374890. "The internet is riddled with various solutions and it came down to simply getting rid of all of that garbage and simple using NO xorg.conf and using this compton command for "fixing" the v-sync to remove tearing.
compton --backend glx --vsync opengl-swc --detect-rounded-corners --detect-client-opacity
"
I did not do that yet, but I'm reading about it to figure out WTFIGO. I don't understand it very deeply, there's something in me that believes this really should not be necessary. But it is, so I'll try.
There are very long discussions about this on the nvidia linux pages, but if you look through there, you'll note that many people don't mention their desktop environment, window manager, and compositing. The fact that some people see this as an inconvenience and others say it is intolerable probably traces back to software. I think the Nvidia site is a little tought to find sometimes, appears they moved it: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98 https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/533434/linux/current-graphics-driver-releases/
I'm able to use the laptop to browse web and do my job, but I can live with it only because I'm a very patient person :) You must be as well, since you are still asking about it.
