Tearing in Fullscreen

[fatnoze]

This question has come up multiple times, but I haven't found a satisfactory answer.

You know the drill: trying to play a number of doujin shmups (and Mame for some, apparently) results in screen tearing that makes the game just about unplayable. I've just installed Boot Camp so I can relive some favourite shmups, and naturally, this is the first problem I've run into.

My understanding is that this has something to do with my monitor's refresh rate being higher than the game's FPS, but that's where my understanding ends. How do I fix this? I'm able to override DirectDraw's refresh rate through dxdiag, and I toyed with it a little, but didn't produce any helpful results. I also disabled DirectX acceleration entirely, which actually fixed the problem, but makes the game look kind of crappy. An acceptable last resort, but I'd rather fix the tearing.

If it matters, I'm getting the problem with BWR, Eden's Aegis, and Crimzon Clover at the moment.Oddly -- and someone else on this forum has mentioned this -- moving my mouse to the top of the screen fixes the tearing, but freezes the game up. I can't think of any reason that would happen!

[Danbo]

Depending on your video card you might be able to try to force V-Sync (vertical sync) on a per-application basis in your card's control panel (nvidia or whatnot). That should fix it, but often v-sync can introduce some delay in games...

[fatnoze]

I tried various vsync preferences, all to no avail!

[Dave_K.]

I've struggled with this for years. Fact is if the game isn't 60hz on the nose, there is always going to be some amount of tearing. You can minimize this by trying triple buffering and sync to refresh settings, or use mame's in game adjustments (hit `) menu to speedup/slowdown the refresh to as closely as possible to your monitor refresh. Other than that, there are special video cards or drivers to allow your machine to drive a real arcade monitor at the original/intended refresh rate.

[louisg]

Yeah, if it's a game that's not at the same refresh as your monitor, you'll either get tearing or jitter. PC games generally run with tearing, though some authors have options which may or may not work to try and vsync.

[dmauro]

It could be a Boot Camp issue. A friend of mine was having a strange video problem that we couldn't figure out, and then they just recently released an update that fixed the problem.