Camera Stuttering and Screen Tearing

[Lerend]

I don't think the camera stutter has anything at all to do with your video card. Rather, it's a programming logic issue - something purely on the coder's end, and it won't be fixed until they patch it.

To illustrate, think of it this way - whenever you move your mouse or your character, the camera responds by changing its rotation or the position it's 'looking at,' respectively. Each frame, the camera has to update the position it's looking at and its own position, (both in x, y, and z cartesian coordinates), and its own angular position (yaw, pitch, and roll).

The stutter is noticeable because they took the simplest form of updating-per-frame there is: "for each frame, new position = old position + this frame's delta/change." So whenever you're walking downhill, the camera is instantly displacing itself downwards however many units you 'fell.'

They could, instead, implement what's called linear interpolation, which results in a much more smooth and natural transition between "new position" and "old position." Each frame, instead of just instantly jumping to its desired point, it travels - usually half, but it's determined by whatever coeffecient > 0.0 and < 1.0 that you want - a percentage of the way to its desired point that frame. So if the camera's at (0, 0, 0) and needs to move to (10, 20, 30), linear interpolation would make it move to (5, 10, 15) the next frame, (7.5, 15, 22.5) the next, and it'd keep going half the distance each frame.

The basic math for it is "for each frame, camera's new position = (coefficient between 0.0 and 1.0) * ((desired position to look at, such as the player's location) - (camera's current position)) + (camera's current position)"

It's much better for aesthetic purposes. With a name like "linear interpolation," it sounds fancy and all, but it's still fairly easy to implement, as illustrated.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation as to why the camera stutter, at least, isn't a problem that originates from your end.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. This is pretty much exactly whats going on, the camera updates instantly whenever something non-transparent is between the camera and the back of my character, causing it to jump back and forth between positions as I move without any sort of smooth transition between the two. It definitely seems to be an engine thing, considering that it happens more with the "mouse" camera than it does the "keyboard" camera (why they used two separate sets of camera code is beyond me), but with so few reports of the issue and so many people saying "my camera doesnt stutter, I have no idea what you're talking about" I was beginning to think the game just hates me.

Now to toss it in the bucket of "hope it gets fixed in 2.0" issues I guess.

[Zeref]

From what i've managed to skim from ancient forum posts around release, it seems like ATI cards are affected by this a lot more (probably due to the poor vsync enforcement). The tearing is definitely a vsync issue and I read a few people fixed it by using MSI Afterburner to enforce 100% Vsync.

However, I have a Sapphire card, not an MSI card, and the last official update to afterburner was v2.1.0 released on 2/15/11, almost a year ago. I'd rather not take the risk of it not playing nice with the latest drivers or a non-msi card just for a little bit of screen tearing.

As for the stutter, it's driving me up the wall :/

Just use the afterburner bro, it's not the Brand you need to worry about, but the card, all ATI cards in a series across the brands use different drivers, all the cards are made in the same way, so if MSI makes the same type of card that you use from Sapphire, the Afterburner utility will have full support for it, the brand is nothing more than the card's paintjob.