polygon tearing! Video Card?

[spkregar]

I have a question concerning a video problem I have been having. First off, I have an Athlon 1900xp, on an Asus A7V266 board, with 640 mb of 2100DDR ram, a MSI – 8822 Geforce 3 pro video card, running Windows XP. I have installed the latest Via 4 in 1 drivers (443v), the latest Nvidia drivers (40.41), and the latest Bios for my MB.
The problem deals with severe polygon tearing I get in high contrast areas in most games (Medal of honor, Jedi Knight outcast, UT, Ghost Recon, UT2003 demo, Nolf2 demo). I have adjusted the settings in the Bios, as well as the display settings. The only thing that stops this is activating the “vertical- sync” tab under settings. Of course this drags my frame rates down like quicksand . So I thought it could be the infamous XP-Nvidia refresh rate problem, so I grabbed “Refresh Lock”. Now at least I can get a barely playable fps now. I have changed all the drivers up from Via 4.33, and Nvidia 28.32, to no avail.
I am looking to upgrade to a new video card (I am really fed up with this problem!) and I just want to insure that this “problem” is not my mother board, monitor, or other weird stuff that I cant even conceive of. Any feedback would be appreciated!
:D

[BipolarBill]

Are you overclocking the CPU or the card? Are both fans in place and spinning?

[AllGamer]

FORGET THE FPS MYTH!

set all the Eye Candies to the maximum and those poligons effect will go away

set AA to max
set Quincux to max
set everything to max
and enable every feature

you don't need to upgrade

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Its down to your card displaying frames faster than the refresh rates of your monitor:

there are sevral ways around this:

1) Increase all aesthetic options to lower your FPS as Allgemer suggests

2) Enable Vsync and in Open Gl based games add the following line to the console "set r_swapinterval 1" (no "'s though :))

3)Buy a monitor with a faster refresh rate at set value

...PS wise moove getting refresh lock as the refresh bug can also increase tearing problems:)

--Jakk:t

[spkregar]

In answer to your questions.

I have tryed overclocking and underclocking the video card with no apparent effect. The Cpu is not overclocked. All fans are working to spec. Case and MB temp look good.

I have tryed turning everything on, nice slide show! In addition, with everything on, (in the games that can run) it still happens.

Thanks for you efforts! I'm not really positive this problen is dependant on my refresh rates, although if it clears up with v-sync, I can't relly argue with that.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Read my above post... theres all the answers to the tearing problem, they solved the problems ive bene having for years... personally id reccomend leaviung vsync on at all times and in non multiplayer games based on the quake 3 engine dont forget the r_swapinterval 1 command :)

Regards

--Jakk:t