If you've ever seen a horizontal line slice across the screen during a fast camera pan, with the top and bottom of the image briefly out of alignment, you've seen screen tearing. It's one of the oldest and most misunderstood problems in PC and console gaming, and the fixes for it range from genuinely excellent to actively counterproductive. Understanding the difference matters more than ever now that most modern monitors and TVs advertise some form of adaptive sync.
Why tearing happens in the first place
Your monitor redraws the screen at a fixed rate, commonly 60, 120, 144 or 240 times per second, expressed as its refresh rate in Hertz (Hz). Your GPU, meanwhile, renders frames at whatever rate the game and hardware allow, which fluctuates constantly depending on what's happening on screen. When the monitor starts drawing a new frame partway through receiving it from the GPU, you get a frame made of two (or more) different moments in time stitched together — the tear.
This is a timing mismatch, not a defect. It happens because, by default, the GPU sends frames to the display as soon as they're ready, without waiting for the monitor to be ready to receive them.
V-Sync: the old, blunt fix
Vertical Sync (V-Sync) forces the GPU to hold each finished frame until the monitor is ready for it, aligning frame delivery with the display's refresh cycle. This eliminates tearing reliably, which is why it's been a standard graphics option since the 1990s.
The trade-off is input lag. Because the GPU has to wait, there's a delay between you moving your mouse or controller and seeing the result, and that delay grows if your frame rate can't keep up with the refresh rate. In its more aggressive 'double buffered' form, V-Sync can also cause stuttering when the frame rate dips just below the monitor's refresh rate, since frames get held back for a full extra cycle instead of showing a slightly late one.
V-Sync is a reasonable choice for slower, non-competitive games where visual smoothness matters more than reaction time — but it's rarely the best option if your monitor supports adaptive sync instead.
Adaptive sync: the modern, better fix
Adaptive sync technologies flip the relationship: instead of forcing the GPU to wait for the monitor, they let the monitor's refresh rate vary to match whatever frame rate the GPU is producing, frame by frame. If the GPU renders 87 frames in a second, the monitor refreshes 87 times that second, each time in step with a completed frame. No waiting, no tearing, and dramatically less added input lag than traditional V-Sync.
This is implemented through a few overlapping technologies:
- VESA Adaptive-Sync — an open standard built into the DisplayPort specification, which monitor manufacturers can implement without paying for proprietary hardware.
- AMD FreeSync — AMD's branding and certification tiers built on the VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, verified for a guaranteed variable refresh range and low-latency behaviour.
- NVIDIA G-Sync — NVIDIA's own technology, originally requiring a proprietary hardware module in the monitor for the tightest tolerances; NVIDIA also certifies many standard Adaptive-Sync monitors as 'G-Sync Compatible' after testing them.
