Screen tearing & stutter test
Moving bars that show what tearing looks like and how uneven frame pacing judders on your own screen. Pick a mode; nothing flashes.
Quick answer: browsers show frames in sync with the display, so a web page can't make your monitor tear for real. To check a game, look for a horizontal split in fast camera pans with VSync off. To fix it, turn on G-Sync or FreeSync and cap FPS 3–5 below your refresh rate.
How to test for tearing in a game
- Turn VSync off in the game and leave the frame rate uncapped.
- Pan the camera quickly left and right in a scene with strong vertical edges such as poles, doorways or tree trunks.
- Look for vertical edges that break and shift sideways along a horizontal line. That line often wanders up and down the screen.
- Now enable G-Sync or FreeSync (driver and monitor menu) and repeat. The tears should be gone while the frame rate is inside the monitor's VRR range.
Which sync setting to use
| Setting | Tearing | Stutter | Input lag |
|---|---|---|---|
| VSync off | Yes | Low | Lowest |
| VSync on | No | Yes, when FPS drops below Hz | Higher |
| G-Sync / FreeSync + FPS cap below Hz | No | Low inside the VRR range | Low |
| Fast Sync / Enhanced Sync | Mostly no | Some, when FPS is only slightly above Hz | Low |
If stutter remains with VRR on, the cause is uneven render times rather than sync: check the frame-time graph on the refresh rate test for long frames, and compare frame rates on the FPS test.
Questions people ask
Can a browser show real screen tearing?
Usually not. Browsers hand finished frames to the operating system compositor, which shows them in sync with the display refresh, so web pages don't tear the way a full-screen game with VSync off can. The tearing mode on this page is a faithful simulation of what a tear looks like, so you know what to look for in games. The stutter mode is real: it shows how uneven frame pacing looks on your actual screen.
What causes screen tearing?
Tearing happens when the GPU swaps in a new frame while the monitor is partway through drawing the previous one. The top of the screen shows the old frame and the bottom the new one, split by a horizontal line. It appears when VSync is off and the frame rate doesn't match the refresh rate.
How do I fix screen tearing?
Turn on variable refresh rate (G-Sync, FreeSync or HDMI VRR) in both the monitor menu and the GPU driver, and cap your frame rate a few fps below the refresh rate. Without VRR, enabling VSync removes tearing at the cost of some input lag. Fast Sync (NVIDIA) or Enhanced Sync (AMD) are middle-ground options when the frame rate is well above the refresh rate.
What is the difference between stutter and tearing?
Tearing is a horizontal split inside one refresh. Stutter is uneven timing between frames: some frames are held for two refreshes and others for one, so motion jerks even though each image is whole. Stutter happens when the frame rate doesn't divide evenly into the refresh rate, or when frames take too long to render.
Does G-Sync or FreeSync stop stutter too?
It stops the stutter caused by a frame rate that doesn't divide into the refresh rate, because the monitor waits for each frame. It cannot fix stutter from frames that take very different times to render (shader compilation, loading, CPU spikes).