Linux + Nvidia multimonitor sync issues

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This is the second time I found myself fighting a nasty bug, where when I watch a video on my second monitor in Firefox and have a game running on the main monitor, everything just starts breaking.

And I mean it as in stuttering, including mouse movements, FPS feels like it’s at 3 or something, and overall just an unusable experience.

I figured it was something to do with firefox encoding using the GPU and overloading it. I spent way too long trying to tweak various about:config options in Firefox trying to fix it. But nope, it’s just a simple setting in the nvidia control panel called “Sync to VBlank”.

nvidia X server settings

After disabling that, everything just works.

Kinda weird how freetube still works with that on though, so maybe there is a secret firefox tweak for it. If you do have a better suggestion on how to fix this, let me know!