Here's one for 7850 owners to figure out.

[The Recessionist]

Again, hello to all. Been a lurker for years, finally jumped in. But, whatever, right? "get on with it, dummy.

OK

This is a new one for me. Grabbed an HD 7850 (2GB) threw it in a machine that had an HD 6870 I was playing with. I went ahead and reinstalled Windows 7 64 on it and deducted some HDDs from the system. Those are about the only changes made to this pc. I always turn on Win Basic theme while I play games. I installed BL 2 and started playing. Immediately got page tearing. Exited out to make sure "wait for vertical refresh" was on in CCC 13.4, it was.

Went back into the game, forced vsync in settings. Still tearing. Thought uh oh. Capped FPS at every option, still nothing.

Read around, and saw others having same issue, and they usually rma the card. I was still far from thinking RMA time.

Thought about it for a minute and turned Aero back on and started the game. Completely fine and beautiful picture. I've not had this experience before. Why would having Aero on stop the page tearing and overall bad quality? I then switched over to the Basic theme again and played a high quality rip in VLC and had the SAME results where there was cuts in the picture. Turned on AERO again, retested movie, perfectly fine.

This is probably a shitty AMD driver problem, right? I've got another HD 7850 still new in the box that I was just going to sale, but now I think I may open it up and see what it does. Was just curious if anyone else had this problem. If you've got an HD 7850, does Borderlands and/or VLC playback have the same problem on your PC when switched to BASIC THEME? I only tried in 1080p and I've only tried with BL2 thus far.

I'm not asking for troubleshooting help, just curious if this happens to others with the 7850.

 

[Domini]

Aero uses Direct3D and enables Vsync automatically which would explain the tearing without Aero.
In game it should be using the ingame settings, i would set the CCC to off, unless application specifies

 

[EvilAngel]

I had this issue with a HD 6850 and a HD5450 that i had on my HTPC. Without aero on i would get tearing and choppiness in Netflix HD video, XBMC and games.

After trying a lot of setting changes i finally identified that keeping aero on fixed everything, I've updated my drivers many times since but haven't bothered to check if this has been fixed.

 

[Nenu]

The game may be using a form of windowed (full screen) mode, Aero affects this.

 

[The Recessionist]

I need to get better familiarized with the software-end of things... This is obvious. The 2 reasons given make sense. I never would have thought disabling Aero would compromise certain things. We're not in XP anymore, that's for sure.

Thanks for the info!

 

[Domini]

I need to get better familiarized with the software-end of things... This is obvious. The 2 reasons given make sense. I never would have thought disabling Aero would compromise certain things. We're not in XP anymore, that's for sure.

Thanks for the info!

The only way to fix the video issue is to turn on hardware acceleration in VLC or use a different decoder. Why not just keep Aero on? It honestly does not effect performance much like when Vista was first out.

 

[The Recessionist]

Why not just keep Aero on? It honestly does not effect performance much like when Vista was first out.

No you're right. It's habit. I still find it funny that everything looks as well as it does with the candy on opposed to it all being turned off. That just seems unWindows like.