I think some of your problems might go away if you try using a frame-rate limiter to limit your frames per second (fps) to the same as your monitors refresh rate. Most common monitors have a refresh rate of 60 so you would set the fps limiter to 60 as well. https://github.com/torkel104/libstrangle

I find that if the frame-rate of a game goes over 70fps with my 60Hz monitor it "looks" really bad and stutters/hitches.

Something else to achieve vsync that sometimes works better than "Force Composition Pipeline" is to install CCSM (CompizConfigSettingsManager) from the Ubuntu repository (probably available in other Linux distros to).

Open CCSM / In "General" click on "Composite" / That will bring up composite options, uncheck the box for "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows".

When you turn off "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows" with CCSM you can also try...

Open Nvidia Xserver Settings / OpenGL Settings / uncheck the box for "Allow Flipping"

...and you will get slight tearing (much less than before) and a smoother overall experience.