So now we have seen both situations where our frame count is out-of-sync with our refresh rate. In both cases we can have tearing, and in the case of a very high frame rate, we are wasting CPU/GPU cycles that could be used to improve our game. We want to avoid tearing. We want to be in-sync with the monitor refresh. How can we solve this problem?
The solution is the Vertical Blank Interval. Remember that the Vertical Blank Interval is when the electron gun is repositioning itself from the last pixel on the display back to the first pixel. During this short period, the entire display has been drawn and the front buffer isn't being used. This period is too short to copy all the contents of the back buffer to the front buffer. However, ...
