Rogue_Delta wrote:

OK, fine, but Im curious. I dont know much about tech, and I heard that anything above 60FPS is useless (or not noticeable) on most screens because of 'vertical tearing'? can anybody explain what this means, please? does it have to do with the refresh rate?
Vertical Tearing:

- Caused by the VDU scanline updating the same portion of the screen that you (or the video card) are currently drawing to.
- Normally the best way to avoid this is to do all the drawing when the scanline is off the screen, and this can be achieved by synchronising the flipping of buffers with the monitor's refresh rate. This is called “Waiting for Vertical Synchronisation”.
- However *some* video cards don't seem to support “Wait for VSync”. Also some cards/drivers allow you to turn off this capability full stop, which some 3D gamers do so that they can have the fastest possible framerates in their games, even though they experience tearing.
- If the card is waiting for VSync but the flipping of buffers (drawing) takes too long, the scanline will have already started updating screen whilst the flip is still going on. This sort of problem often results in a more or less stationary tear near the top of the screen (or further down on slower video cards.)
- Even though TFTs are supposed to be “progressive scan”, i.e. only updating the portions of the screen that have changed, scanlines and vertical tearing can be seen on nearly all of them, especially older models! (OK this thing about progressive scan is total bull, please ignore it)
- Tearing is most obvious on fast horizontally moving sprites. It looks like the sprite is cut in half horizontally and the two halfs are drawn as if one has been dragged left and one has been dragged right.
- You can also see vertical tearing on fast vertically moving sprites, but what happens is it looks like the sprite has been stretched vertically.
- Some vertical tearing is "clean" i.e. just one tear, and some tearing is ragged, which can really mess the sprites up.
- Also sometimes the tear stays in the same place on the screen, and
other times it can appear to move up or down the screen.
- Tearing can make the sprites look like they are "jerking", even though they are actually moving smoothly in Video RAM.
- Tearing is not so much of an issue for slow moving or small sprites, or puzzle games without much movement. It mainly affects scrolling games and action games with many large sprites.