Solving screen tearing

[branyap]

Hi,

I'm new to building PCs, and I have recently built a HTPC for my parents (Specs below). However, I noticed that when watching videos online, there is a presence of some screen tearing. I am not sure what has caused it, and also how to prevent it. Hope you guys can help! Thanks!

Specs:
CPU - AMD Athlon 5350 APU (Radeon R3 graphics)
Memory - Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3-1600 1x4GB
Storage - Crucial BX100 250GB
Motherboard - Asrock AM1H-ITX
OS - Windows 7 Home Premium

Note: I am using a TV as a display (http://www.philips.co.uk/p-p/24HFL2808D_12/professional-led-tv). Could it be the TV's problem?

 

[DasHotShot]

Hi,

I'm new to building PCs, and I have recently built a HTPC for my parents (Specs below). However, I noticed that when watching videos online, there is a presence of some screen tearing. I am not sure what has caused it, and also how to prevent it. Hope you guys can help! Thanks!

Specs:
CPU - AMD Athlon 5350 APU (Radeon R3 graphics)
Memory - Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3-1600 1x4GB
Storage - Crucial BX100 250GB
Motherboard - Asrock AM1H-ITX
OS - Windows 7 Home Premium

Note: I am using a TV as a display (http://www.philips.co.uk/p-p/24HFL2808D_12/professional-led-tv). Could it be the TV's problem?

Tearing is related to the displays refresh rate and the frames your gfx card is producing. You can solve it by aligning the refresh rate to the "video feed", meaning the chip crunching your pixels. In this case there is no card and your TV could be set to any rate, I don't know.

If you have heard of v-sync, this alligns the refresh rate to the FPS being sent through from the gfx card. Meaning you will always get 60 FPS and hopefully no tearing. This is a feature in games though.

Try going into the display settings and looking at the refresh rate your TV is set to there. Set it to 60 Hz if it isn't already.

If it is, you need to go into the graphics settings and see if you can set up some form of multiple buffering to alleviate this issue.

 

[clonazepam]

A couple of years ago, I spoke with nVidia about screen tearing when viewing online content. Basically, the content is running at a frames per second rate that is not identical to your display's refresh rate. A good way to minimize it for now is to, at the least, have the display's refresh be a multiple of the source material's fps. Example: a 60fps youtube video might be displayed at 59.76 fps, and so there's going to be some tearing during fast scenes. The higher the refresh of the display, in this case mine is 120Hz, the tearing is barely noticeable.

With any luck, AMD's freesync spec will spill over into the home theater space and be seen in televisions, but since its part of a displayport tech, you'd be looking for televisions / monitors with that connector type.

Right now, about all you can do is make sure you have a nice thickly shielded cable and hope for the best.

Here's the FAQ on AMD's freesync.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/freesync-faq.aspx

I'm personally waiting to see what comes of this. I view content a lot more than gaming these days, so freesync is pretty exciting, nice quality of life upgrade in the future.

For example, here in the US, a lot of content is at 24 fps, so a 60Hz monitor displays frames at rate thats not a multiple of 24. Upping the refresh to 120Hz has helped immensely, but hasn't eliminated the problem completely. Only a freesync or gsync tech might do that in the future.

 

[jadc007]

If you haven't got Aero theme enabled ... enable it - Believe it or not this can cause screen tearing (Fixed my problem)