Severe screen tearing on modern Intel Iris Xe Graphics when X11 Fractional Scaling (150%) is enabled

Distribution

cinnamon 22.3

Package version

6.6.9

Graphics hardware in use

13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1335U

Frequency

Always

Bug description

When using a modern 2K/QHD laptop display at 150% fractional scaling under the standard Cinnamon (X11) desktop environment, severe horizontal screen tearing occurs across the middle of the display during video playback (Netflix and YouTube) and fast horizontal window movement. When using Wayland or the nromal 100% scale the tearing disapears but wayland still has some bugs i dont want to deal with every day and for some reason the 100% scale makes everything extremely tiny (thanks for reading al of this)

Steps to reproduce

1. Boot into the standard Cinnamon (X11) default session.
2. Open Display Settings and enable Fractional Scaling at 150% ("Scale content down" mode).
   3.Play any high-motion action sequence or pan a browser window quickly.
3. A distinct horizontal tearing line consistently cuts through the center of the viewport.

Expected behavior

The desktop compositor or window manager should properly handle vertical synchronization across the virtual 4K fractional container canvas without dropping frame alignments during active media parsing on newer Intel GPUs.

Additional information

Applying Option "TearFree" "true" directly within /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-modesetting.conf significantly mitigates window stutter but does not fully resolve the middle canvas split when "Scale content down" is handling video streams. Switching to the Experimental Wayland session fixes the tearing entirely but introduces severe pointer/touchpad acceleration regressions and session locking profile errors on standard native applications like Firefox.

Start by reproducing the issue in the standard Cinnamon X11 session with a 150% fractional scale, then compare video playback and fast window movement at 100% and in Wayland. Review the reported /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-modesetting.conf TearFree setting and confirm whether the fix removes the center tearing line without introducing the reported Wayland or scaling regressions.