Le blog de Olivier Crête

After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

That said, we’re in 2011, and it’s still impossible to use OpenGL on two monitors without tearing. How incredible is that! The thing is, my second monitor is a 50″ Plasma TV and I really hate tearing there when I watch a movie. So when I have two monitors, I want the VSync to be on the second monitor. Luckily NVidia (yea sorry) has an environment variable to select which monitor an OpenGL application syncs on, the annoying thing is that this has to be set before the application is started. So after a little messing around with Looking Glass (which is pretty amazing), I was able to set the variable into the shell and have it re-exec itself. After getting that to work, I couldn’t resist writing an extension to do it for me. Be warned that if you switch screens at runtime, you also want to apply the patch from bug #645408 for now.

Update: I’ve been informed by our very own Daniel Stone that free drivers are better and can actually do the VSync correctly.