Had some SD content (Star Trek Deep Space Nine) that exhibits tearing. Here is what I did to cure it on my Mac Mini 2010 running Mavericks 10.9.5 with nvidia 320m graphics card.
First, download the alternate driver for the Mac Pro Nvidia Driver for 10.9.5 at
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Mac/Quadro....03f01.pkg
Place it on the desk top and open terminal and enter the following command in order to allow it to be installed on non mac pro machines running nvidia graphics.
pkgutil --expand ~/Desktop/WebDriver-334.01.03f01.pkg ~/Desktop/WebDriver
Open up your newly created folder 'WebDriver' on your desktop and search for the distribution file, edit with TextWrangler/Text Edit and change var found_hardware = 0 to: var found_hardware = 1
Now that we have made the edit, need to repackage the installer. Remove the original .pkg from your desktop and type:
pkgutil --flatten ~/Desktop/WebDriver ~/Desktop/WebDriver-334.01.03f01.pkg
You have now edited the .pkg installer to prevent from checking if you have the correct system definition!
This was found here at
http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/14168...03f01.html
The first post of this thread also lists alternate drivers for other versions of mountain Lion and Mavericks. The file names in the commands above should match the file downloaded from nvidia.
The instructions and link to the alternate driver for Yosemite is here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php...stcount=63
Hope this helps. It totally cured the tearing issues for us on all our 2010 mac minis whether running mavericks or yosemite.
More reading on this can be found at macrumors.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1748213
Did not need the cuda drivers for this.