My screen is tearing or stuttering
Tearing and stuttering look similar and have opposite causes. Telling them apart takes one question, and the fix follows from the answer.
These two problems get reported in the same words and have close to opposite causes, so the first job is deciding which you actually have.
Tearing is a clean horizontal line across the screen, with everything above it showing one frame and everything below showing the next. It is most obvious when panning a camera or scrolling quickly. It happens because the graphics card delivered a new frame while the display was halfway through drawing the previous one.
Stuttering is motion that hitches, pauses or briefly repeats. Nothing splits. It happens because frames arrive late, unevenly, or not at all.
One produces too many frames for the display to handle cleanly. The other produces too few, or delivers them at irregular intervals.
Fixing tearing
The frame rate and the refresh rate need to be synchronised.
Variable refresh rate is the best answer if your hardware supports it. G-Sync and FreeSync make the display wait for the graphics card rather than the other way round, so frames appear whole without adding latency. Enable it in your graphics driver and confirm it is also enabled in the monitor’s own menu, which is a step people miss.
V-Sync is the older approach and still works. The graphics card holds each frame until the display is ready. It removes tearing completely, at the cost of input latency, and it causes stuttering if your frame rate drops below the refresh rate.
A frame rate cap slightly below your refresh rate reduces tearing without full synchronisation, and pairs well with variable refresh to keep it inside its working range.
Fixing stuttering
Stuttering has more possible causes, so work through them.
Check your real refresh rate first. A display set to 60Hz when it could run at 144 produces motion that many people describe as stuttery rather than slow. This is worth ruling out before anything else because it costs nothing.
Check for a frame rate that keeps crossing a threshold. Motion that is smooth then hitches repeatedly often means the frame rate is dropping in and out of the variable refresh window, or in and out of your V-Sync target.
Check background load. Something consuming CPU or disk in bursts produces exactly this pattern. Browser tabs running heavy scripts are a common and easily missed cause.
Check thermal throttling. Stuttering that appears only after twenty minutes of use, and disappears after a rest, is heat. This is especially common on laptops.
Check the cable, again. A marginal cable that cannot quite carry the signal can cause dropped frames rather than an outright failure, which looks like stuttering.
When neither is a fault
Variable refresh displays genuinely fluctuate, and a measurement will show that as high jitter. That is the feature working as designed rather than a problem to solve.
Some stuttering is also in the source material. Video shot at 24 frames per second does not divide evenly into 60Hz, so it is displayed with an uneven cadence that looks like judder. No display setting fixes that, because the frames simply do not exist.
Common questions
What is the difference between tearing and stuttering?
Tearing is a horizontal split where the top and bottom of the screen show different frames, caused by the display refreshing mid-update. Stuttering is motion that hitches or repeats, caused by frames arriving late or unevenly. Tearing comes from too many frames, stuttering from too few or from uneven delivery.
Does V-Sync fix tearing?
Yes, by making the graphics card wait for the display before showing a new frame, which eliminates the split. The cost is input latency, and stuttering if the frame rate falls below the refresh rate. Variable refresh solves the same problem without either drawback, which is why it largely replaced V-Sync.
Why do I get tearing in one application only?
Synchronisation is set per application. A game with V-Sync off will tear while your desktop, which is always synchronised by the compositor, does not. Check that application's own graphics settings before changing anything system wide.
I have G-Sync enabled and still see stuttering.
Variable refresh has a working range, commonly around 48Hz to the panel maximum. Below that range it stops helping and some implementations use frame doubling with mixed results. Stuttering that only happens when frame rates drop into the thirties is usually this.