Xbox 360 Screen Tears

[James]

Outside of the PC realm screen tears are rather rare because of good optimization. The only game I've seen so far that has them for Xbox 360 is Perfect Dark Zero which is surprising considering who made the game. Just wondering if any other game thus far has this problem?

[Bluteg]

What's a screen tear?

[s1lence]

Yeah, im into pc gaming and I've never heard that term. Is that the jaggedness that you get at times on mass amounts of graphics in the game? I haven't seen any problems with Perfect Dark, maybe you can explain what you mean then I can tell you more of what I've seen.

[Bluteg]

Ah, I think I know what your talking about now. Are you talking about when your playing a FPS and turn your crosshair and the screen has a rowed splitting affect. Shouldn't a better vid card help with this?

[James]

A screen tear is when just for a second your picture looks as though it has been cut into two or more pieces and have been misaligned in the middle or overlapped incorrectly. It has to do with video refresh and syncing issues. A better video card may help but more compatible hardware will help more. This is why Doom 3 works better with Nvidia GPUs and Half-Life 2 works better with ATI GPUs.

[njiska]

Ah, I think I know what your talking about now. Are you talking about when your playing a FPS and turn your crosshair and the screen has a rowed splitting affect. Shouldn't a better vid card help with this?

Yeah that's exactly it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_tearing

[Zing]

Wow, that last post was totally off the mark. The type of video card you have has absolutely nothing to do with tearing.

"Tearing" is occurs when the game's internal refresh rate is higher than your display's refresh rate. Basically, the game is rendering faster than your screen can display it, and this causes partial frames to be shown. You end up seeing parts of two different frames at the same time.

This can be alleviated with two methods:
1) Higher refresh rate on the monitor - This isn't a guaranteed cure, but can be pretty good if the refresh rate of the display is significantly higher.
2) Vertical sync (V-sync) - This syncronizes the game's refresh rate with the display's refresh rate. The bad thing about this is the frames-per-second will be locked at a multiple/divisor of the refresh rate, which can make the framerate less smooth.

NTSC televisions are running at a 60hz refresh rate interlaced. This means they only display half of a frame 60 times every second or 30 frames in progressive mode. This very low, especially for first person shooters which are particularly sensitive to low framerates and tearing. I guess the Xbox 360 doesn't force v-sync on, which is really odd considering DirectX defaults to forcing v-sync on and video drivers that are submitted for WHQL certification must not disable v-sync by default. MS probably left it up to the game to decide and I guess PDZ disabled v-sync to give better performance.

[Bluteg]

I've noticed this while playing the Warriors in 720P and a few other 720P Xbox games.

[Rabid Peanut-Butter]

I've seen tearing in Perfect Dark Zero as well. Madden is pretty bad as well. I've also seen it happen once or twice in Condemned and Kameo though you really have to be looking for it. I've also only seen the tearing occur on HD TVs, probably due to the higher resolutions.

[s1lence]

Ok, i know what you are talking about, I just didn't describe it correctly. I had seen it in Halo 2 on the 360, but my HD doesn't support 720p, only 480p and 1080i. I haven't seen it in any other game other then perfect dark.

[Zing]

I suppose v-sync was deemed unnecessary or undesired (or techincally impossible?) for use on a television, an interlaced display. Most modern console games appaer to already be at a minimum performance level, so forcing v-sync on when playing games in progressive mode would be too detrimental to performance.

It's just another way to ruin the next generation's eyesight.

[Biff_McFresh]

Interesting, I always thought the term refered to those little white dots you sometimes see on the edges of surfaces/walls/textures, etc etc. Anyone know what I'm refering to?

[djbeatmongrel]

not to get off topic but, nice Atog Zing

[James]

Wow, that last post was totally off the mark. The type of video card you have has absolutely nothing to do with tearing.

I disagree I've seen screen tearing due to a bad video card in a PC before. I do agree with the rest of your statements though.

[Gamereviewgod]

Having played through all of Perfect Dark 360, the only time I noticed any problem like the ones described was in the jungle level, and it was brief, usually with a frame rate dip. It didn't bother me at all. I played in 480p and 1080i.

Njiska PM'ed me about it after reading my review since I didn't mention it, and I double checked myself against other reviews. There's no mention of it in either IGN's or Gamespot. Maybe it's just an isolated thing or odd glitch?

I did have a great glitch though where a dead soldier kept bouncing off the surface of the water, quite high too. Lasted for about a minute.

[Anthony1]

There definitely is screen tear in PDZ. At first, I thought it was my projector or something, but the fact that other people with PDZ are all noticing the same thing, confirms that it's a problem with the game and not the display.


The times I've seen it, so far, have been very brief. So it's not like it's so bad that you can't play the game or anything. I could certainly believe that there are people with PDZ that don't even notice it at all.

[njiska]

Having played through all of Perfect Dark 360, the only time I noticed any problem like the ones described was in the jungle level, and it was brief, usually with a frame rate dip. It didn't bother me at all. I played in 480p and 1080i.

Njiska PM'ed me about it after reading my review since I didn't mention it, and I double checked myself against other reviews. There's no mention of it in either IGN's or Gamespot. Maybe it's just an isolated thing or odd glitch?

I did have a great glitch though where a dead soldier kept bouncing off the surface of the water, quite high too. Lasted for about a minute.

Yeah but IGNorrant also didn't mention the Framerate issues in Quake 4 either.

Truth be told if you check out those videos i sent you links to (2 are up now) you'll see a fair number of glitches. Some aren't very noticable, but they're there and unforgivable..

[hezeuschrist]

Interesting, I always thought the term refered to those little white dots you sometimes see on the edges of surfaces/walls/textures, etc etc. Anyone know what I'm refering to?

Those are artifacts. Usually caused by overheating of the GPU.

[unwinddesign]

Wow, that last post was totally off the mark. The type of video card you have has absolutely nothing to do with tearing.

I disagree I've seen screen tearing due to a bad video card in a PC before. I do agree with the rest of your statements though.

That would be because the graphics card was crap and couldn't keep up a solid frame rate. With it jumping all over the place, you get slowdown and all sorts of ugliness related to it. Not truly a V-Sync problem, just a case of the graphics card being incapable of rendering certain things quickly.

Hence frame rates that look like a jackrabbit on crystal meth.