Horizontal Flickering in Games

[ndawson]

I recently built a good spec gaming PC including an MSI Radeon HD 7970.

It works perfectly in everything but games. I get weird horizontal flickering when I'm moving close to objects.

At first I thought it was just the game (BF3) but it's happening in STALKER and a bunch of other games as well. The performance is nice and smooth so it's not a frame rate problem.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

 

[Sunius]

Do you experience something like this?

If so, it's called screen tearing and there's a very easy fix for it: just enable vsync.

 

[gidgiddonihah]

Do you experience something like this?

If so, it's called screen tearing and there's a very easy fix for it: just enable vsync.

You beat me to it. Screen tearing happens when the FPS gets higher than your monitors refresh rate is (normally its 60Hz, though I have seen more and more 120Hz and a few 200Hz if I remember correctly). The screen cannot display that many frames in a second so you get screen tearing. Like Sunius said, just turn on vsync, or if you don't have the settings maxed out (or in BF3, the extra HD graphics pack), do that. Pushing the settings higher will cause your card to work harder and the FPS to dip further down. Vsync just puts a cap on your FPS.

 

[ndawson]

PERFECT! I thought my card was dud. Cheers for all the help