20-nvidia.conf in xorg.conf.d doesnt exist

I'm new to GNU/Linux, running xubuntu 15.10 with a GTX 570 graphics card, and am trying to prevent screen tearing in scrolling web pages, videos, and steam games. I get no screen tearing with the PPA version of the nvidia 355.11 drivers, but it requires me to enter the following in the terminal after every boot and during a steam game.

 nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"

It seems in order to make the change permanent, I need to add a line to the xorg.conf file (which seems to be deprecated) or the 20-nvidia.conf file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ but neither files exist. In my /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory there are only the following files:

10-evdev.conf 11-evdev-trackpoint.conf 50-wacom.conf
10-quirks.conf 50-synaptics.conf 51-synaptics-quirks.conf
11-evdev-quirks.conf 50-vmmouse.conf glamoregl.conf

and none of them have a screen section, or serverlayout section. I've tried several workarounds but they either don't fix the tearing or cause lightdm to not start at all. I've made a xorg.conf file with sudo X :1 -configure and placed it in the /etc/X11/ directory then added in the following:

Section "Screen"
Option "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"
EndSection

and tried a shell script in /etc/profile.d/ to run the first terminal command I mentioned earlier. It either doesn't stop the tearing and I have to change the nvidia setting in the terminal to fix it like usual, or lightdm just doesn't display anything and I have to recover through grub loader. If I save the configuration settings in nvidia x server settings it creates a file .nvidia-settings-rc but nowhere in the file can I see it mentioning the current metamode.

Some of this information used to get me where I am seems outdated, but I can't find 20-nvidia.conf or some kind of equivalent on my drive.

Giovanni Toraldo's answer will fix my screen tearing but the permanent solution isn't applicable.

• xorg.conf manual
• PPA drivers

1 Answer

I had success generating a new xorg.conf simply with nvidia-xconfig in the terminal. Added in the aforementioned "metamodes" option, moved and renamed xorg.conf to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf and haven't seen screen tearing since.

This section on the ArchWiki was most useful