Sublime Forum

ST4 Screen Tearing

#1

Hello, I’m on version 4200 and for a while I’ve been experiencing screen tearing and have kept to myself until speaking with a friend who also has the issue, so I figured I’d reach out.

I use one package: Neovintageous, and the severity of the tearing when I scroll in the editor is the same with and without the plugin. The issue has manifested on the following machines:

  1. Lenovo Legion 5i RTX 2060 Windows 11 23H2 & 24H2,
  2. Gaming Desktop: Windows 11 24H2 & 25H2, Ryzen 7 7700, RTX 4070
  3. M2 Macbook Air I will say the issue less pronounced on this machine

The only thing I’ve tried to fix the issue is disabling packages.

As a final note, most of my displays are 4K resolution, and use Windows DPI scaling either 150% or 200%. The worst offender is my 4K TV which uses 200% UI scaling, it’s actually very intensely distracting. This is horizontal tearing when scrolling the editor.

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#2

I also experienced various tearing effects or vsync problems when scrolling, during the last few years, depending on NVIDIA driver versions and whether using hardware_acceleration on Windows. Fonts sometimes even rendered with hippy looking colored pixels, all of which turned out to be either caused by certain driver versions, graphic- or monitor-settings.

In general scaling up UI is not causing issues, as ST still leverages full resolution to render text. With proper settings, font rendering is crisp and sharp these days on all my machines.

When using default settings (no opengl hw accelleration), vsync is controlled by Windows and thus disabled sometimes, depending on power saving settings, which can cause text to feel like flummery, when scrolling.

Make sure settings don’t cause any sort of color compression to be enabled. This is the case if a graphics card, connection (cable, dp/hdmi protocol version) or monitor can’t keep up with required data rates. An old GTX980 for instance is not able to drive 3K/4K screens beyond 100Hz, natively. Doing so causes rendered screen content to be sent with colors compressed, which causes terribly looking font rendering. Same can happen if a gaming monitor is running in overclocked mode to to deliver as fast as possible screen refresh rates. TVs also tend to post-process screen content.

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#3

Interesting! Thanks for the thorough response. I’ve set “opengl” on windows for hardware acceleration, and things are feeling more like my Macbook already. For my monitors, I run over good quality DisplayPort cables, and (I can’t believe I neglected to mention) all displays are 60hz, so that should add up to decent bandwidth.

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