Video tearing on nVidia chipsets

On systems with nVidia chipsets running Mint 14+ (Ubuntu-based), there is tearing when plaing videos with movement. It almost looks as if graphics acceleration is not enabled, as shown in the example:

First, try to upgrade the nVidia drivers. The edgers ppa is recommended:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Next, add the following variables to /etc/environment (as Administrator).

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True

One thing that might also help is to enable “Prefer Maximum Performance” on the PowerMizer configuration for nVidia X Server Settings. however, the CLUTTER environment variables seem to solve the problem most of the time.