Is screen tearing always guaranteed to happen when frames per second go beyond your monitor's refresh rate?

[saffron3d]

My monitor's refresh rate is 60hz.

A little while ago I was playing a video game and I managed to get 200+ fps. At first I thought I would surely get lots of screen tearing but I noticed nothing at all happened.

Does this mean it's not a 100% guarantee that screen tearing will happen even when the fps is so much higher than your monitor's refresh rate?

 

[bjornl]

It was almost certainly happening, but the FPS was so high you never noticed. If you can't tell it is there, do you really care if it is?
Consider disabling v-sync and using afterburner for a more consistent gaming experience.

 

[Eximo]

It is only really noticeable when your frame rate happens to put the split between the frames right in the middle of the screen.

When you have 200 FPS on a 60Hz monitor there will be 4 splits somewhere, but probably not in the center.

I think larger screen sizes also make it more noticeable. Particularly at lower resolutions. Lower pixel density, wider the line.

I only noticed it on my old system when I finally installed a game it couldn't quite run. Then I was constantly seeing a screen tear right under the crosshair. A Crysis mod as I recall.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Screen tearing happens when the monitor displays portions of 2 or more frames. The tearing effect comes from the fact that images have moved from one frame to the next. So for example if the game view is rotating, the top half of your screen may have appeared to have shifted in one direction compared to the bottom half, and the tear is where these two halves meet in the middle.

If your framerate is very high, then things will have moved a relatively small amount. So you would have more tears for each image displayed on the screen, but each tear would be slight. So it may be less noticeable than a single, larger tear.