[Duke of Hazzard]

I usually try to get rid of tearing by turning on V-Sync, because I don't mind input lag when playing games using a controller, but I've been getting tons of microstuttering in certain games, which made me turn off V-Sync. With it, though, of course the tearing comes back.

But lots of gamers game without V-Sync. People who are keen on FPSes, racing sims, all prefer to play with V-Sync off because it increases lag. Are these people not bothered by the tearing or do they have a solution that I'm not aware of?

I've been thinking it's my monitor. It's a Samsung full HD, but a budget one.

[RoyBatty]

I've trained myself to just ignore it, I don't even see it anymore unless it hovers in the same place on the screen. Most of the time I'd much rather NOT have any kind of stuttering or input lag.

[Malgon]

I guess it depends on what bothers you more, tearing or input lag. I tend to game with it off for the most part, so as to remove the laggy input from the mouse, although some games are really horrible with it off (Crysis comes to mind). One of the ways you can help to reduce it is by turning on Adaptive V-Sync on compatible Nvidia cards. Below is the explanation taken from their site on how it works:

Quote

Adaptive VSync
Nothing is more distracting than frame rate stuttering and screen tearing. The first tends to occur when frame rates are low, the second when frame rates are high. Adaptive VSync is a smarter way to render frames using NVIDIA Control Panel software. At high framerates, VSync is enabled to eliminate tearing. At low frame rates, it's disabled to minimize stuttering. For a superior solution, which eliminates stuttering, tearing and the addition of VSync-related input lag, see our G-SYNC technology page.

Link

I'm not sure if AMD has the same feature on their cards or if it is specific to Nvidia users. The other alternative around tearing and stuttering (although not necessarily input lag) is to buy a compatible G-Sync monitor which has a V-Sync which is variable and adjusts to your card's framerate accordingly. From what I have heard it does a fairly good job of it for the most part. I think this is only compatible with Nvidia users, but don't quote me on that. Apparently there are also G-Sync adapters, but I don't know how widespread they are, or how compatible they are with the enormous range of monitors out there.

[The Commander]

I always play with vsync off.

[Person of Color]

If you want to use vsync and avoid input lag, go to your Nvidia control panel and set "Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames" to 1.

If you use a Radeon card, download RadeonPro and set "Flip Queue Size" to 0.

Be sure to only set these options for games that have this issue. It forces your video card to always render in between frames, without any buffering. This can kill performance will newer software that has better vsync inplementation.

[oasiz]

I've had some luck with adaptive v-sync, not perfect but it seems to be slightly better than regular v-sync.


Also while this mostly applies to video footage it's worth knowing.
You should look out for 59.94Hz (NTSC rate) and 60Hz ("Standard" computing) differences.
For some reason manufacturers just started pushing out the flawed 59.94Hz, this shows as 59Hz usually in settings.
NTSC used to be nice 60Hz until color was added. Proper TV footage is actually not pure 60Hz because of this.
For some reason, 59.94Hz started quietly replacing the more rounder 60Hz which had been the norm for years.

Anyway, especially if you watch video that differs by that ~0.06Hz you will get tearing or stuttering as it tries to drop/dupe a frame to keep in sync.
Gaming footage and such is usually 60Hz and TV footage at 59.94Hz. However like I mentioned, they tend to mix both for computing these days so it's worth checking.
Not sure if some panels even properly sync to both, might still show it but drop/dupe frames like some video players tend to do.

[Robman]

Just spit on it, that other stuff is expensive