It may be a silly question so please, bare with me as I'm new to ATI:

How can I make my 4850 to force vertical sync?

I obviously set the driver (8.5) to "always on" but it doesn't work... not in BF2 anyway.

Any ideas?

I'd suggest using newer drivers for starters, like these:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support [...] deptID=894

Most of my games have a vsync option in them, but I assume by your question that one doesn't. I don't know, I'm afraid.

Yes, definitely start with the newer drivers. I got lucky and heard about the "hotfix" the day i got my 4850 so I never have had that problem with it.

there's beta drivers out with the hotfix

v_sync hurts you performance wise. Why would you want to use it ?

Some games tear horribly to the point you'd rather reduce frames than play as-is. Also, V-Sync doesn't necessarily hurt performance.

What OS?

I always use Vsync. I have notices that Nvidia says they can no longer force it on vista. Maybe ati can not either.

Either way. Vsync off looks and feels jumpy since parts of the screen are faster then others. It depends on the game, but in general Vsync "Performance hit" takes place outside of most(not all) users ability to see more frames anyway(60+).

Because if you have an LCD and get a lot of FPS it tears badly and looks AWFUL and ruins the graphics for me.

I get constant 60 fps in games with vsync on with my 9600GT which is perfect for me and looks smooth as hell, getting more is pointless anyway as an LCD can't really display more than 60 fps and the tearing looks god awful.

I usually keep vsync on in games, cause tearing irritates the hell out of me. But if your card can't keep up and only does, say, 50 fps while your monitor refreshes at 60 Hz, then your FPS could drop down to 30 with vsync on. That's the only time you'll take a noticeable performance hit, and obviously if your card can't keep up with your monitor there's no reason to have vsync on.

To be honest, when I replied I was thinking of Crysis. Played it once and an am playing it again on 2 different machines and opsys's. I haven't tried vsinc on in this game and I'm sure it won't help any...lol. Always thought vsinc held back in performance.

Vsync locks your frame rate to the refresh rate of your screen. It will make a 300fps game run at 60(75,85 or whatever your screen refresh is). So that may(is) be considered a performance drop(for benching, but the user will most likely never notice it).

The advantage is you do not get the page tearing effect of having frames load faster then the screen will display them. It gives almost a line look when playing games and panning the camera left to right.

Simulated page tearing. it can even happen in more then one spot(look between the red lines)

Word. In addition to you monitor not being able to refresh faster than 60/sec, most people can't even see a difference above 60 frames/sec. It's interesting to see people justify paying exorbitant amounts of money so they can play a game at 120fps when it really doesn't make any difference unless they take a huge drop in frames.

My problem is solved.

I firstly installed catalyst 8.6. It was a disaster. Still no vsync and my frame rate in BF2 dropped to 40-50, hitting as low as 8fps...

Installing the 4800 hotfix did the trick. Vsync works perfectly and I'm getting 75fps with max AA&AF. CoD 4, GRID and DIRT run like a dream at high/ultra settings too. I'm happy now. It looks like I've managed to build quite a lean system for E400.

Hotfix link:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support [...] onID=35298

Thx!

Sorry, I should have been more clear: the "hot fix" actually has the driver and CCC all in it as well, no need to download anything else. I just can't wait to see what driver updates will do for performance down the road!