Fix tearing for NVIDIA in Ubuntu 18.04 Mate

I noticed terrible tearing inside firefox after upgrading to 18.04 and getting new 2k monitors finally. I had a guess that it was related to vsync not being enabled, however the NVIDIA X Server Settings indicated that “Sync to VBlank” was already enabled and I took that to mean that vsync was enabled. I still had the problem until I tried this solution which was to enable vsync inside the proprietary driver. I changed my driver for my Quadro K2100M integrated graphics to using the “NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-390 (proprietary, tested)” inside of “Software and Updates”. In summary, do the following:

$ sudo echo "options nvidia-drm modeset=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-drm-nomodeset.conf
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
$ sudo reboot

Check with:

sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

Now you can scroll vertically with no noticeable tearing.