I don’t think I’m up for this - don’t understand what to do and also there’s talk of tearing with the Nvidia only driver. Not something I want to get into resolving. This is all too low-level for me.
Surely the Nvidia driver would be used by graphics-heavy apps like Unity?
It should, but the driver I saw running was the MESA (open source one), hence your artifacts. The tearing is not a problem. It means that the graphic card’s frame rate exceeds your monitor’s refresh rate. That doesn’t happen across the board and is solved via a VSYNC function, which most desktop environments now have.