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What is Tearing?
Today’s cards are getting faster and faster and nearly all PC enthusiasts strive for faster frame rates without considering the consequences and the affect it has on your gaming experience.
If your graphics card produces more frames per second than the monitor can refresh, then the monitor can’t keep up. It looses synchronisation with the graphics card and tearing occurs. For example, if your monitor is set to refresh 60 frames per second then it will only show 60 frames per second.
This normally occurs when the monitor tries to grab the contents of the frame buffer which is being updated constantly by the faster graphics card. This results in a corrupted image.
It’s easy to spot tearing. You’ll notice that the game you playing will start to appear like it’s split between the top half and the bottom half, where the top shows the current frame and the bottom shows the previous frame. What you get is an occasional flicker.
So how do I get round this?
Firstly, before buying a new card or spending £££son an SLi or Crossfire set-up, check that you monitor is up for the job. It’s pointless buying a card that’s producing shit loads of wasted frames per second when it’s clear that you’ll not get the best from it. The graphics card is important, but useless without the monitor. So choose wisely.
Anyway, that’s another subject. Of course increasing your monitors refresh rate will always give you the best results but you are tied to the maximum refresh rate set by your monitor which can’t be changed any higher than what it will allow.
If tearing still occurs after increasing the refresh rate then the game is producing a ridiculous waste of frames. You can run FRAPS to check the number of frames being produced. However, it’s not going to help. Try adjusting the games settings to high detail and/or increase the Anti-Aliasing or anisotropic filtering at the same time. This will give you better visuals and at the same time reduce the number of frames per second, because the card has more work to do. Don’t go to mad, most of these settings may drag the performance down to an unplayable level, so experiment.
Lastly, you can enable V-Sync. Most games come with a V-Sync option in the games video settings. What this does is force the graphics card to wait until the monitor grabs the frame buffer and refreshes the screen. Therefore, the buffer isn’t updated until the monitor has finished with it. However, there’s a catch. If your frame rate drops below the motors refresh rate, then you may get performance problems because then the graphics card starts to lag behind.. The complete opposite. You can’t win!
You can enable triple buffering to help with this, but my preferred option is to try increasing the level of detail of the game forcing the card to slow down. As I said, this makes the game look better whilst reducing the risk of tearing.
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