Can overclocking cause tearing?

[Master Chief]

Hello people, I just finished the Doom 3 Demo. Although one thing I noticed was that some times the screen would "tear" in some spots but then quickly go back to normal. This is on my dads computer. His specs are as follows:

Abit NF7-S v2
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (OCed to 2.2ghz)
XFX GeForce 6800
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
1gb of Corsair Dual Channel Memory

I overclocked the 6800's 3D to 355mhz core clock and 775 memory clock frequency. The default for this card is 325mhz core clock and 750 memory clock frequency. Did I overclock it to much? I havent seen any graphical glitches however, but in the Doom 3 Demo it doesnt seem to tear as much when it is set to defaults. I was running the Demo in Ultimate mode(and got rock solid high FPS ). I dont remember seeing this in games like Half Life 2 or Halo often. Any ideas?

[Cloud Strife 7]

I don`t think it`s the overclocking that does that. I`m asuming you are playing at a high resoultion, right? Try to enable V-sync, as I heard that the low monitor frequency can sometimes cause screen tearing if you are in high resolutions. But this only happens for a short time, and only when you sudenly move the mouse quick enough.
I read this in Serious Sam 2`s configuration.
Did that help?

[Master Chief]

Yeah right after I posted and went and messed with the settings and enabled V-SYNC. fixxed it! Thanks!

I went into the options and enabled Wait for Vertical Synchronization. Worked!

[Mr. Killjoy]

Beware of Vsync if you play multiplayer, it tend to make your FPS drop a lot, by multiples of 2... for example if your monitor runs at 100hz, if your PC can't render at 100 fps,
it will go down to 50, if not 50 fps, then 25, etc... making it less smooth than it should.

Tearing is no big deal IMO, framerate is more important than tearing removal

[XxCrashxX]

man I cant stand tearing, drives me crazy

[Mr. Killjoy]

Raise your game details settings, tearing is generally due to framerate being too high
for the monitor, or too low... it depends on the situation

[Cloud Strife 7]

Good to know it works. I have a poor little video card (I`ve been thinking of upgrading it for 6 months now) so I never used high resolutions, and thus I couldn`t test the V-Sync.

[Mako Eyes]

Originally Posted by Mr. Killjoy

Raise your game details settings, tearing is generally due to framerate being too high
for the monitor, or too low... it depends on the situation

It's due to the framerate not being at a value that isn't a multiple or factor of the monitor's refresh rate.

So if the refresh rate is 100Hz, then the non-tearing framerates would be anything that's a multiple or factor of 100: 10, 50, 100, 200, and so on.

I would rather the performance hit than put up with tearing anytime. It just drives me insane.

[Mr. Killjoy]

Yeah I know, but most of the time, it occurs between 50 and 100 fps, cause the gap between current fps and refresh rate steps is higher than with lower framerates