What is tearing?

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vbp6us

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 2, 2003
Messages
420
Hi,

I noticed that as of yesterday my some of my games are experiencing little jolts while im playing. For example i'll be playing CS and my ping would be 28ms but my character would stutter every so often. Definitely not from my connection.

In NFS:U i noticed it does that too. It almost stops and goes. It's really fast but kind of annoying. I have vsync off btw. Could that be the problem? I have AA and AF on 4x and games run really smooth most of the time. Like I said, its just a small stutter every so often and then goes away. :(

Any idea what the culprit is?
 
Tearing is caused by your monitors refresh rate and your frame rate being out of sync with each other. Vsync is designed to fix this by forcing the frame rate to certain values (equal to your monitors refresh rate, or a multiple of)

This however doesnt sound like the problem, stuttering will be due to slowdown which could be caused by anything really. Post up your system specs, it could be that you've just got your settings too high for your hardware.
 
Tearing is easy to recognize. Imagine an image, any image. Now imagine that from some given point downwards the entire image is shifted slightly to one side so that it doesn't line up with the portion above it.

Tearing is pretty much like I described. As you play and as the image changes (from moving or from the scenery changing) if you notice small image shifts (where the image does not match what's above) then you've got tearing.

Note that tearing can only occur if your framerate is higher than the refresh rate of your monitor. So if your curent refresh rate is 85 Hz and your framerates are above 85 FPS and you have VSync disabled, you may experience tearing.

With VSync enabled, the framerate will not run above the refresh rate or it will run at some multiple of the refresh rate. Something to that effect anyway, my knowledge of this goes back to when I cared (Voodoo1 anyone?) The end result being that you don't get tearing because you are never rendering frames faster than or out of sync with your refresh rate.

The idea behind disabling VSync is that you are never holding back the graphics card from rendering frames, hence a higher framerate.

Some run with VSync disabled to get every last bit of framerate they can and on a benchmark this can make a difference in your score. But in my experience, disabling VSync has little effect on in-game experience so far as performance is concerned and may cause tearing, which can be distracting. In reality, if your refresh rate is 85 MHz or more, why would you need your framerates to be above 85 FPS unless you are running a benchmark?
 
When the game "jolts" or "stutters" do you see or hear HDD activity (ie. HDD light flashing once or twice)?
If thats the case it is just using the swapfile, probably since you ran out of physical RAM.
 
Note that tearing can only occur if your framerate is higher than the refresh rate of your monitor
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Er it can occur if the frame rate is lower than the monitors refresh rate aswell, providing its not a multiple. Its nothing to do with speed, its sync. Either way what he discribes is frames being dropped not tearing, tearing doesnt make the image lag, it simply distorts it.
 
Originally posted by Princess_Frosty
Er it can occur if the frame rate is lower than the monitors refresh rate aswell, providing its not a multiple. Its nothing to do with speed, its sync. Either way what he discribes is frames being dropped not tearing, tearing doesnt make the image lag, it simply distorts it.
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You're right and I think that's what I meant to imply (it was late.)

And yes, what he's describing is not tearing, I was just trying to describe it for him to help hime rule that out.
 
Believe me, you'll know tearing when you see it. You'll get a fucking migraine after awhile. I VSYNC all my games since my 9800pro.
 
My system specs are in my sig.

So tearing is out the window. The weird thing is it only happens every couple minutes of the begining of the game and then goes away. It's not even here anymore so it must be the harddrive reading. :(

Oh well.
 
Originally posted by vbp6us
The weird thing is it only happens every couple minutes of the begining of the game and then goes away.
Click to expand...
Yes, this sounds like hard drive activity or AGP texture loading lag. Nothng to wory about if it doesn't happen throughout the game.
 
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