How do refresh rates/fps work to prevent screen tearing?

[Frankieanime158]

I understand how and why screen tearing happens, but I hate having to use Vsync, or fork over lots of money for for fancy monitor.

But.. Is this correct?

- If your FPS is lower than your refresh rate, you won't have screen tearing -

If I was getting 100fps on a monitor with a 144hz refresh rate, I would not tear until I passed 144fps?

Curious because you can find cheap monitors with higher refresh rates, like 75hz etc. Than I could just use something like Bandicam to cap at 60,

and visuals would be better.

[Oshino Shinobu]

While tearing is less likely when the FPS is below the refresh rate of the monitor, it does not mean it cannot happen. Whether you get screen tearing under the refresh rate of your monitor varies, depending on the game, combination of hardware and some other things that are somewhat hard to test and document. 

[Frankieanime158]

Alright, thanks for the information

[rhyseyness]

Screen tearing occurs when your monitor refreshes between your GPU putting out 2 different frames.

I.e. your monitor displays part of one frame and the other part of the other.

This is more likely when your frame rate is above your refresh rate, but can still happen even when your refresh rate is above your frame rate.

G-Sync/freesync monitors solve this by only refreshing when a frame is sent by the GPU.

Without G-Sync/freesync, there's no real way to completely eliminate screen tearing.

As long as your monitor refresh rate and frame rate are different/out of sync, there's a risk of tearing.

Hope this helps