Why do I get such bad screen tearing?

[ryanfergo]

My PC is more than capable of playing games like BF4 on ultra at above 60 fps, but in almost every game I play I get god awful screen tearing and it really takes away from the experience for me. I can't use v-sync either because of all the input lag it causes.

I've tried all sorts to stop it, and whenever I play a game now I cap the frames at 59 (after reading that screen tearing is caused by having a faster frame rate than your monitor can display) and use D3DOverrider for v-sync, but I still get screen tearing most of the time. I don't know if I just have a crappy monitor or what.

I just want the silky smooth 60 fps without screen tearing that v-sync provides, without having input lag.

Monitor: LG Flatron E2442 60hz 24"
GPU: AMD Sapphire R9 290
CPU: i7 2600 3.4ghz

 

[mr91]

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[nukemaster]

Your screen tearing has nothing to do with the monitor.

Simply put any time the frames are not being drawn 100% in sync with the screen, it may end up refreshing a partial frame. This can happen above or below the refresh rate. Even capping the frame rates at 60 would not help because you would still not line up perfect with the screens refresh.

If you can ALWAYS hold 60fps, try to force vsync on with triple buffering off. This can reduce some of the lag caused by vsync, but will force your system to drop to 30fps as soon as 60 can not be held.

Until monitors can change refreshes to match the video card, we are kind of stuck with this.

 

[ryanfergo]

Your screen tearing has nothing to do with the monitor.

Simply put any time the frames are not being drawn 100% in sync with the screen, it may end up refreshing a partial frame. This can happen above or below the refresh rate. Even capping the frame rates at 60 would not help because you would still not line up perfect with the screens refresh.

If you can ALWAYS hold 60fps, try to force vsync on with triple buffering off. This can reduce some of the lag caused by vsync, but will force your system to drop to 30fps as soon as 60 can not be held.

Until monitors can change refreshes to match the video card, we are kind of stuck with this.

I've been disabling triple buffering whenever I can figure out how to but I still get some input lag. I've been considering just buying a 120hz monitor.

 

[vortical]

New monitors releasing this year will come with display port 2.1 which allows for adaptive Vsync. (the non proprietary yet exactly the same thing form of NVIDIA's gsync). Buy one of them when they release.

 

[Rationale]

I've tried all sorts to stop it, and whenever I play a game now I cap the frames at 59 (after reading that screen tearing is caused by having a faster frame rate than your monitor can display) and use D3DOverrider for v-sync, but I still get screen tearing most of the time. I don't know if I just have a crappy monitor or what.

Screen tearing has nothing to do with your framerate. It will happen no matter whether your framerate is at 100 fps, 60 fps, 59 fps, 30 fps, or even 10 fps. It's a synchronization problem, not a framerate problem. People who think they fix it by just capping their framerate are suffering heavily from a placebo effect, and are poorly informed.

Screen tearing also has nothing to do with the quality of your monitor.

A 120hz monitor will not get rid of screen tearing, it'll just make each tear last less time, so it'll be less noticeable. But it won't fix it.

 

[lucasdb007]

I know this sounds crazy but I've had the same issue you are having. After buying a second GPU it turned out to be caused by using a classic windows theme. If you are using one of the classic themes try using one of the aero themes.