what is with screen tearing

[PieIsAwesome]

I was playing around a bit with UT3:

With vsync on there is no tearing, of course, but there is noticeable input lag.

With vsync off and fps cap at 60 aiming is so much nicer and precise, but the tearing is really really bad. I don't remember the tearing ever being this bad with previous monitors I have used.

With vsync off and fps cap at 30 aiming is still perfect and tearing is reduced to a more acceptable level.

Using a 24" asus at 1920x1080 60hz.

So I guess I am wondering why the tearing is so much worse at 60 fps than 30 fps and why it is worse on this monitor than others. A laggy mouse is unacceptable for this type of game so I am sticking to 30fps w/ no vsync for now but its a bit of a shame because I can run this game at 60 fps perfectly.

 

[CP5670]

The game might not be capping itself at exactly 60fps, but something like 59.99fps or 60.01fps, leading to a lot of slightly overlapping frames. I've seen this effect in some other games. Apparently vsync is the only way to guarantee that the cap is rigidly enforced.

Try turning off framerate smoothing and mouse smoothing if you haven't already. I find that these settings cause much more input lag and other motion artifacts than vsync.

 

[dflynchimp]

I was playing around a bit with UT3:

With vsync on there is no tearing, of course, but there is noticeable input lag.

With vsync off and fps cap at 60 aiming is so much nicer and precise, but the tearing is really really bad. I don't remember the tearing ever being this bad with previous monitors I have used.

With vsync off and fps cap at 30 aiming is still perfect and tearing is reduced to a more acceptable level.

Using a 24" asus at 1920x1080 60hz.

So I guess I am wondering why the tearing is so much worse at 60 fps than 30 fps and why it is worse on this monitor than others. A laggy mouse is unacceptable for this type of game so I am sticking to 30fps w/ no vsync for now but its a bit of a shame because I can run this game at 60 fps perfectly.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3591&p=2

hope this does anything for you.

 

[NoQuarter]

Tearing happens when the frame buffer gets written with a new frame while the monitor is updating screen. At 60 fps this happens much more often than at 30fps.

At 30fps each frame is sitting in the buffer for twice as long so the monitor has a much better chance of reading the full frame before it gets a new frame slammed into the buffer.

At 60 fps each frame is sitting there just long enough for 1 read from the monitor so if it's not exactly in sync it will very often be hijacked with a new frame in the buffer. Which shows up as 'tearing'.