How To Actually Fix Screen Tearing in DuckStation Not Just Enabling VSync

Posted on Saturday, September 14th, 2024

If you’re just embarrassed for DuckStation when it can’t even run ancient games like “Final Fantasy V” in emulation on modern PCs without screen tearing, it’s not as simple as “enable vsync”. The Enable VSync is right in there in DuckStation, but you can do all sorts of tricks, check this, uncheck that, whatever, and a simple ass game like “Final Fantasy V” just won’t run smoothly without that ugly distracting screentearing. So here’s the real solution.

It’s not using Vulkan as your renderer or switching to software rendering. Trust me. It’s not running at native resolution, turning off all enhancements and filters, fixing wonky geometry, none of that. It helps, but clearly I’ve tried them all.

It’s because that damn entire emulator is built on top of DirectX, so you need to do some additional settings from your Nvidia Control Panel to fully utilize DirectX gimmicks.

Open your Nvidia Control Panel (assuming you have a Nvidia GPU) and add the DuckStation exe to the “Manage 3D Setting” panel. Then look for an option labeled “Maximum pre-rendered frames” and max it up. There’s also options for triple buffering which you might want to enable too. It doesn’t hurt. But the idea is you need to pre-buffer even those basic ass 2D frames if you want smooth gameplay in DuckStation. “Tenchu Stealth Assassins” also has the same problem and seems to have disappeared after I set this crap in Nvidia Control Panel. Hey, give it a try on your own PC. My old Windows 7 PC playing old ass DuckStation version 0.1.5624. Good luck!

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