Screen tearing!

[katawaM@STER]

Who else is experiencing pretty heavy screen tearing while playing KS? It's not just during sprite movement and camera pans, but also when the screen fades to and from black or white. Basically any time the screen is not static. I tried forcing VSync through the NVidia driver, but I think that is only meant for 3D applications since it does not work. Any ideas on how to fix this? Because otherwise the game feels exceedingly well-made (gamepad support, fuck yeah).

[Not One Of Us]

Same deal here. Forcing it doesn't seem to help.

Strangely, I didn't notice any tearing in the opening video, if there was any at all.

[Not One Of Us]

Actually, scratch that. Just hit a cinematic and there's definitely noticeable tearing.

[katawaM@STER]

Update: I found a workaround. When I enable an Aero style on Windows 7 (I normally use Classic) and run the game there is no tearing at all. It's a solution, but it's a bit of a roundabout one.

[dragonfi]

I thankfully didn't experience any such problems. Anyway, here are some general troubleshooting questions that might or might not be relevant.

Does it happen in windowed or fullscreen mode? (Or both?)

How old is your computer? (Of course, if this would be a perfomance issue, I'm sure the game would have almost locked up on the flood-of-medical-text part in the popening.)
Alternativeley, posting the whole configuration (processor, videocard, ram, etc.), and the operating system you use can greatly aid in tracking down issues like this.

Update: I found a workaround. When I enable an Aero style on Windows 7 (I normally use Classic) and run the game there is no tearing at all. It's a solution, but it's a bit of a roundabout one.

That would mean you use Windows 7 then. I'm not too knowledged in Windows systems, but I guess it uses another engine to draw the windows, so it sounds reasonable that it might affect the tearing.

[Guest]

Incidentally, I never experienced any screen tearing, and I was using Windows 7 with the Classic theme, so I don't think this should really be related to Aero's fancy-shmancy automatic VSync it does when Aero's enabled. I mean, it's good that enabling Aero so it does VSync for you may be a workaround, but I don't think there should be tearing due to lack of that automatic syncing. For your information, I personally always play in fullscreen (and usually tearing doesn't show up in programs in windowed mode-- almost always solely fullscreen mode that does this), and my card is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650. I don't have VSync on by default or forced. I notice that at least one person was using an NVidia card when they had this problem, so maybe it's an NVidia thing? But also, it seems like the game is kind of intensive for a visual novel due to the RenPy engine, so other things could conceivably cause this besides your video card. I personally have a 2.2 GHz Core Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM on this laptop (running Win7 64-bit, naturally)... No performance problems here, although I did notice scenes involving effects like rain and such are apparently way more intensive than normal scenes (according to opening Task Manager while I was out of the game, it might have actually been maxing out one of my cores with that rain since it was hovering around 50% CPU usage, and it continues to process everything while you're tabbed out as well... sheesh).