Tearing = Overheating?

[Rebel7254]

AMD Athlon XP 1900+
Asus A7V333
PNY Geforce4 Ti4400
512 MB DDR RAM

Return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn't seem to tear at all the first few minutes I start playing, but I start noticing it more and more as I play. Could this be due to my video card overheating. I'm running it at 1280x1024 with 2x AA and 2x anisotropic filtering. It runs smooth except for a little tearing which I could live with.

P.S. I know all about VSync, blah blah blah. RTCW swap file blah blah. If you'll look around, a lot of folks with GeForces are having problems with tearing in Quake 3 based games no matter what they do. Mine is actually working quite well, compared to some people that say it's so annoying they can't play. So just tell me if overheating would have anything to do with it or not. I'm guessing not, because I can play Unreal Tournament and Soldier of Fortune (not the new SOF2) for a long time and it doesn't do that. But I'm not sure.

 

[vss1980]

I doubt it would be overheating, as these games aren't the only thing to stress the graphics chip. I am more inclined to think that it could be an oversight in the Quake3 engine or nvidia architecture and after a while the frame buffer just goes out of sync with the graphics card refresh cycle (or something along those lines).