2D refresh (redraw?) problems - Fedora 10 x86_64 + 9800GT + 180.22

[alx_chem]

I had been using the 64-bit versions of Fedora on a PC with an FX5200 AGP card for the last few years without any problems whatsoever. Recently I changed my system and now I am running Fedora 10 x86_64 on an MSI DKA790GX Platinum motherboard with a Phenom 9950 CPU and a Gainward 9800GT 1024MB GS graphics card. I am using gnome with compiz-fusion enabled, pretty much with its default settings, except for "Texture Filter" set to "Best" and "Refresh Rate" set to the same frequency as my monitor, in hopes of resolving the following 2D problems which do not occur always, but more often than not:

• When I open a new tab in Firefox, the tab button is not drawn immediately; rather first appears the spinning circle and the rest of the button a little later. If I open consecutively (not all at once) a few tabs, the respective buttons overlap while they are drawn and sometimes they stay overlapped until I click on one of them or the pointer hovers over them.
• When working with text (in terminal, gedit, Writer, web forms, etc.) the cursor might appear in two places at the same time, e.g. if I start typing and at some point I decide to go back a few words, using the mouse, the cursor will be flashing at the new place, but it will also appear (not flashing) where I stopped typing.
• Probably the most annoying of all is that when I have multiple similar-looking tabs open in Firefox, or just a web page that refreshes its content frequently, the change is not visible when it should be, e.g. when switching between pages of an on-line store which contain different items, usually I am still seeing the previous page. Again, clicking somewhere, hovering over the different parts of the page, minimizing and restoring the window, or using Alt-Tab to switch fro and back to the page, refreshes its contents.

I am currently using the 180.22 driver, though I had the same problems with the 177.x series drivers even with the proposed tweaks (GlyphCache and the others). I'm not sure if the bug has to do with my hardware or software, but I've used Fedora 10 on my previous rig, with exactly the same settings and had none of the aforementioned nuisances. I have attached my .nvidia-settings-rc file as well as the output of the nvidia-bug-report.sh script, in case someone finds something useful in its output.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it is impossible to take a screenshot of the corrupt windows because as soon as I hit the PrtScn button, the windows change to what they should be and the screenshot contains the updated version of them.

EDIT2: Someone suggested I should enable the "backingstore" option, but that didn't work either. Now, even though I disabled that option I can't get more than 60fps with glxgears.

[alx_chem]

And here's my Xorg.0.log

[Plagman]

Can you confirm all these problems go away if you disable compiz/desktop effects? If not, please attach a bug report as per the sticky thread on how to report a problem.

[alx_chem]

Well, I've tracked down the culprit to an if clause in my compiz-manager script, that invoked compiz with the --loose-bindings flag. I commented that out, and all my refresh problems were gone. The only thing that still troubles me is that even though I tried some 3D games at high resolutions without a glitch, glxgears can't go over 60fps and the gears' revolution is quite jumpy.

[ledoc]

glxgears 60fps is caused by opengl sync to vblank. Why do people get "troubled" about glxgears at all when they can play smooth high-res 3D at the same time???

[alx_chem]

That is correct, after running a diff on all of the configuration files I messed with, I disabled sync to vblank in my .nvidia-settings-rc and everything went back to "normal". Under which circumstances would I need to have it enabled?

Regarding glxgears, a few years back, a coworker of mine who worked on simulations on the SGI platform pointed to the app as a means to roughly diagnose potential rendering problems. I am not a gamer (except for the occasional round of gnome mines), so for me the best indication that my graphics subsystem is set up OK is the output of glxinfo and glxgears.