How to Fix Screen Tearing in Games

Screen tearing is a timing mismatch: your graphics card hands the monitor a new frame partway through the screen being drawn, so the top of the display shows one frame and the bottom shows the next, split by a visible horizontal line. The clean modern fix is adaptive sync — turn on FreeSync or G-SYNC in both your monitor's menu and your graphics driver, and the tear vanishes without the input lag old VSYNC used to add. If your panel has no adaptive sync, a frame-rate cap or VSYNC is the fallback. Tearing is one of those problems that looks like a fault and is really just two devices running on their own clocks. Understanding why it happens tells you exactly which fix to reach for first, and which ones cost you responsiveness.

Why screen tearing happens

Your monitor redraws the image a fixed number of times per second — its refresh rate, measured in Hertz. A 144Hz panel redraws 144 times a second, on a steady beat it never varies. Your graphics card, meanwhile, renders frames as fast as the game and the hardware allow, and that rate is anything but steady: it climbs in a quiet corridor and drops in a busy firefight. When the card finishes a new frame and pushes it to the screen in the middle of a refresh, the monitor draws the top portion from the old frame and the bottom portion from the new one. The seam between them is the tear.

The important thing is that tearing is not a defect in your monitor, your cable or your card. It is the default behaviour of two independent clocks that are never told to wait for each other. It also gets more visible the further your frame rate drifts from your refresh rate, which is why it can look worse in a fast game where the frame rate swings wildly. If you want the deeper mechanics of how frames reach the panel, the motion research at Blur Busters is the reference we lean on.

The proper fix: adaptive sync (FreeSync / G-SYNC)

Adaptive sync solves tearing at the source by flipping the relationship around. Instead of the graphics card racing a fixed refresh, the monitor varies its own refresh rate on the fly to match whatever frame rate the card is producing. If the card renders 96 frames this second, the panel refreshes 96 times; if it renders 138 the next, the panel follows. Because the two are locked together, a frame is never delivered mid-refresh, so there is nothing to tear — and because the card is never forced to wait, you do not pay the input-lag penalty that made old VSYNC feel sluggish. This is the fix to use whenever your hardware supports it.

There are two brand names for the same underlying idea. AMD calls it FreeSync, NVIDIA calls it G-SYNC (and “G-SYNC Compatible” for FreeSync panels it has certified), and both are built on the VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, so the practical differences are far smaller than the marketing suggests. Our G-SYNC vs FreeSync guide explains why the flavour barely matters on a modern setup. The one thing that does matter is turning it on in two places, because it is off by default in at least one of them more often than not.

• In the monitor's on-screen menu.Look for “Adaptive-Sync,” “FreeSync” or “G-SYNC” and enable it. Some panels ship with it switched off from the factory.
• In your graphics driver.Enable G-SYNC in the NVIDIA control panel, or FreeSync/Adaptive Sync in AMD's software. Both need the driver's permission as well as the monitor's.
• On the right cable and port. On a PC, adaptive sync is most reliable over DisplayPort; make sure you are plugged into it rather than an older HDMI input if the panel offers both. Our how to set up a gaming monitor guide covers the ports-and-cables checklist.

The fallbacks: VSYNC and a frame-rate cap

If your monitor genuinely has no adaptive sync, you have two older tools. The first is VSYNC (vertical sync), the option built into almost every game. VSYNC forces the graphics card to hold each finished frame until the monitor is ready for it, which removes tearing completely — but because the card now waits, it adds a slice of input lag, and if your frame rate drops below the refresh rate it can halve to keep them in step, which feels like a stutter. VSYNC is a real fix for tearing; it is just a blunter one than adaptive sync, and the lag is why competitive players avoid it.

The second, and often the better fallback, is a frame-rate cap. Tearing is worst when the frame rate is higher than the refresh rate, so capping your frames a touch below the refresh — say, 141fps on a 144Hz panel — keeps the card from overshooting and dramatically reduces tearing while adding far less lag than VSYNC. Most games have a built-in frame limiter, and both the NVIDIA and AMD drivers can impose one system-wide. On a panel with no adaptive sync, a frame cap is usually the first thing to try.

For the record, the combination competitive players actually use on an adaptive-sync monitor is: adaptive sync on, VSYNC on in the driver as a safety net, and a frame cap a few frames below the refresh rate. That keeps the frame rate inside the adaptive-sync range where tearing cannot happen, without ever handing the job to laggy VSYNC. It sounds fiddly, but it is a set-once configuration.

The order to try the fixes

Work down this list and stop at the first one that clears it up.

• 1. Turn on adaptive sync in the monitor menu and the graphics driver, on a DisplayPort connection. This is the real fix and the one to reach for first.
• 2. If the panel has no adaptive sync, cap your frame rate a few frames below your refresh rate in the game or the driver. Low lag, big reduction in tearing.
• 3. If tearing persists, enable VSYNCin the game. It removes tearing entirely at the cost of some input lag — the trade competitive players dislike but many single-player fans accept.
• 4. Check the cable and port. A loose or under-spec cable, or the wrong input, can stop adaptive sync engaging even when everything is enabled.

What screen tearing is not

It is worth separating tearing from the other motion problems it gets confused with, because the fixes are different. Tearing is a horizontal split; if instead you are seeing a faint trail smearing behind fast-moving objects, that is ghosting, and it is a pixel-response problem the panel's overdrive setting addresses — our monitor ghosting fix guide covers that one. And if the whole game feels laggy rather than torn, the culprit is latency elsewhere in the chain, which our how to reduce input lag and input lag vs response time guides untangle. Match the fix to the symptom and you will not waste time turning off the wrong setting.

The takeaway is simple: tearing is a timing mismatch, and adaptive sync is the tool built to end it. If you are shopping and want to guarantee a tear-free future, buy a panel that lists FreeSync or G-SYNC support — effectively every monitor we recommend does. Our best 144Hz gaming monitors and best 1440p gaming monitors all carry it, and our how to choose a gaming monitor guide puts it on the checklist where it belongs.