Fill Rate issues

[whiplash willy]

I have been out of the PC gaming world for a couple years now, and just jumped back in with a new Gaming System:

Intel E8400
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Kingston HyperX DDR2 800 (2 gigs)
BFG 9600GT

I am very impressed with how this system performs, especially considering it only cost me $500 to put this system together. One thing has been bugging me though, in some games like Team Fortress 2 and Portal, I think I am having some fill rate issues. When I make quick movements with the mouse, the walls and floors seem to break up into 1cm horizontal pieces across the screen. I believe this is a fill rate issue, but am not sure. The weird thing is, my frame rate doesn't drop. I am not sure If I just have the settings too high, or if something is wrong with my system. I run both games at 1280X1024 with all of the details on high and 2x anti-aliasing. Can anyone help me out?

 

[chizow]

This is textbook "tearing". Enabling Vsync either in the drivers or game settings should fix this for you.

 

[whiplash willy]

Awesome! I will try that. I am used to keeping Vsync off because back in the day it caused a slight delay in my mouse movements.

 

[BFG10K]

If you're using vsync, don't forget to enable triple buffering too.

 

[Dream Operator]

BFG10K beat me to it! Here's a little more depth on it though.

At that res, your card should rock!! I would expect 2-4XAA, 16XAF and everything maxed on most games. I generally run at 1600x900, some games at 1080P with my 9600GT. I may SLI or get a better single card, but that's a whole different thread!

An important setting with Vsync is Triple Buffering. It allows the card to prerender frames while it waits for the refresh. The frames may or may not get used. Basically, it makes the performance impact smaller when using Vsync. The options in the Nvidia ctrl pnl only affect OpenGL games, not Direct3D. I use a Riva Tuner to enable the setting for D3D. Something I recently discovered myself. Now I play Crysis w/ Vsync on. I did not notice the performance hit that I did before. Check out the link below for more details.


http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html

"Triple Buffering: This setting is covered in detail on this page of the Gamer's Graphics & Display Settings Guide. If set to On, this setting allows your overall performance to improve when Vertical Synchronization (VSync) is enabled in games. Therefore if you want to enable VSync - whether in the in-game settings or in the Nvidia Control Panel, it is recommended you enable Triple Buffering as well. However note that using Triple Buffering may cause problems for graphics cards with lower Video RAM, so disable this option if you?re experiencing problems such as mouse lag in games. Note further that this option only works for OpenGL games at the moment, so to force Triple Buffering in Direct3D games (which is the majority of recent games), see the Advanced Tweaking section."

Adv. Tweak section Pt 2. describes Riva Tuner. I found it easy and straight forward.

 

[betasub]

Nice sumary, DO!

Put that 512MB vRAM to good use - enable triple buffering when you use vsync.