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Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain in what scenario you think it is better to have a display show two half images slightly faster (milliseconds) than one full one?

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Text editing. I mostly work on a single line at a time. The chance of the tear ending up in that line is low. And even if it does, it lasts only for a single screen refresh cycle, so it's not a big deal.

And you're not limited to two images. As the frame rate increases, the number of images increases and the tear becomes less noticeable. Blur Busters explains:

https://blurbusters.com/faq/benefits-of-frame-rate-above-ref...

As the frame rate increases, the latency decreases, making it a non-issue. I rather chose this option, over blinking screens.

The minimum latency is bottlenecked by the monitor unless you allow tearing.

No, the monitor’s refresh rate is a hard limit on the minimal maximal-latency. It doesn’t mean that you are actually close to that minimum, or that it is the hard limit that is active, aka the bottleneck.

Text editing is mostly about reading, not writing. Scrolling up and down code is actually one of the worst scenarios i can think of, where you absolutely don't want to have tear. Because even as the document is moving you are still reading it.

When touch typing, fingers work decoupled from the eyes anyway, unless you are waiting for the intellisense or copilot prompt, that is usually constrained by language servers anyway, not the framerate.

Many technologies have been invented to allow to display "two half images slightly faster", such as interlaced scanning...

Most humans will actually prefer the "slightly faster" option. (Obviously if you can do both, then they'd prefer that; but given the trade-off...)

Input latency. I find the forced vsync by compositors annoying even when doing simple stuff like moving or resizing windows - it gives a sluggish feel to my desktop. This is something i notice even on a high refresh rate monitor.

First person shooters. Vertical synchronization causes a noticeable output delay.

For example, with a 60 Hz display and vsync, game actions might be shown up to 16 ms later than without vsync, which is ages in FPS.

Key word here being "might". What actually gets displayed is highly dependent on the performance of the program itself and will manifest as wild stuttering depending on small variations in the scene.

I've seen no game consoles that allow you to turn vsync off, because it would be awful. No idea why this placebo persists in PC gaming.

Personally - gaming. Never liked vsync

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