If you play games, and you love being immersed in them, there’s nothing worse than screen tearing (even low-res textures are forgivable sometimes…)

Owww my face!

It’s also pretty jarring when you’re playing a competitive game like Dota, CS:GO, or Starcraft and rapidly moving your screen around causes distracting tears across the screen.

Why does this happen?

It’s because of a lack of synchronization between the GPU output and monitor input. This happens when the GPU feeds many new frames to the monitor — especially in fast moving scenes — the monitor can’t keep up with completely refreshing the whole screen.

What can we do about it?

Well there are multiple ways to go about it, and here’s some information I gathered from personal experience and the Internet.

The best and most promising fix to this to change fundamentally how monitors and GPU communicate with each other, which Nvidia and AMD are already doing with G-Sync and FreeSync.

However, that requires that you buy a particular GPU card AND monitor that supports these features. Availability of these monitors are also limited especially if you live outside the U.S.A.

So! Here’s just some methods I’ve gathered to help resolve this.

1. Use a monitor that has a fast refresh rate

If the refresh rate of the monitor is fast enough, it should refresh fast enough that the tears are perceptibly smaller, and thus less jarring.

You don’t need any particular GPU to work with them, but ideally they should be fast enough to make use of the quick refresh rate.

These screens can render up to 144hz, meaning 144 times a second!

Normal screens can only refresh at less than half of that — 60 times a second.

These screens also cost a fair bit more compared to normal screens.

2. Enable Vertical Synchronization in your game/application

One of the most popular ways to reduce screen tearing is to enable VSync (also I think that’s where the Nvidia and AMD names GSync and FreeSync come from).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television#Vertical_synchronization

What it does is asks the GPU to wait for the monitor at specific intervals to make sure it doesn’t interrupt or deliver half-frames to monitors.

You should be able to enable it in most modern games.