Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Disabled V-Sync in X Box 360 Games Causing Glitches?

Vertical synchronization (aka v-sync) is a necessary evil of computer graphics to keep refresh rates all fine and dandy so you don't see graphics errors like tearing (where frames overlap and it looks like objects in the game don't line up) when you are playing the latest and greatest like Gears of War. This is a good thing. But this v-sync delay can cause your framerate to drop. This is a bad thing. So some manufacturers don't enable v-sync to keep the framerate up.

Do you prefer v-sync enabled or disabled games for your X Box 360? Can you notice the tearing in any game?

It would be nice to know which games have v-sync enabled and which ones don't - but until game manufacturers publish this data we'll have to go off of observation. From playing Quake4, it looks like it is v-sync enabled as I haven't seen any tearing at all. (If anyone can find an example of tearing with some screenshots then please send me the link)

Let me know what X Box 360 games you've played that you think have v-sync enabled below in the comments. It looks like they are also trying to keep a running list over in the AVS forum where you can read more about it. Here is an interesting quote from one of the threads:

'I spoke to Tim Sweeney, from Epic Games, to get a prospective of the Direct3D side. However his response, while not technical in nature, really got at the heart of the matter. "I don't have any clue why someone would disable VSync for gameplay. The only legit reason for this is to benchmark 3D card performance without the monitor's refresh rate skewing the results. Regarding a 'philosophical VSync difference between Direct3D and OpenGL', that's nutty. There is no visual benefit to having a game render more frames per second than your monitor is displaying."'

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