Frankly the whole compositor eyecandy wanking is an abomination. Turn of the compositor, and stop sucking Nividia's dick (thanks Torvalds), and the problem should go away over night.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196351 and marked it off-topic.
You know what else isn't constructive? Copying memory around and around and around and doing basic blitting when we can share GPU memory and have it all composited by the GPU for less power and much faster than the CPU can. And you get all sorts of other effects for free.
There's a reason OS X does it. There's a reason iOS does it. There's a reason Android does it. I don't know about Windows but I think they started in 7 or 8.
I could be wrong for doing so, but I read that as somewhat derogatory, in case you didn't mean it that way.
Notice that you can flip a setting on Intel stuff that sync updates.
Best i can tell most if not all of the complaints comes from people using Nvidia's proprietary drivers without attempting any tweaks, and blaming X11.
When I first turned off the compositor, even just dragging a window around the screen was an amazing experience. I now have it disabled everywhere, and I much prefer the occasional afterimage trail than adding a noticeable rendering delay to everything for the sake of a semitransparent terminal.