V-Sync is short for "Vertical Synchronization"; its only purpose is to avoid screen tearing in games.
What is screen tearing?
Image by Vanessaezekowitz, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under the CC-By-SA 3.0 license.
Screen tearing happens, because your GPU sends a frame to your screen when the latter hasn't yet finished displaying its previous frame. You are essentially seeing part of one image and part of another at the same time. Since both images often look very similar, it looks like the picture has been torn apart, hence the name "screen tearing".
V-Sync ensures the GPU doesn't send a frame while the screen is busy. There are various ways to achieve this. The most well known use double buffering or triple buffering.
When using double buffering, the GPU uses two frame buffers; the "front buffer" in which it stores the frame being sent to the screen, and the "back buffer" in which it stores the next image to be displayed.
Unlike double buffering, triple buffering uses two back buffers. Once the GPU is done with the next frame, it can start working on the second back buffer. If the screen still isn't ready by the time the GPU has filled both back buffers, the GPU can now safely overwrite the first back buffer. The advantage of this, is that it reduces the lag mentioned in point 2 (see below). The disadvantage, is the higher memory requirement of having one additional buffer.
Recently, a new technology has been introduced intending to replace V-Sync: G-Sync (Nvidia) and FreeSync (AMD). Just like V-Sync, their purpose is to eliminate screen tearing, but now the screen will wait for the GPU, if the latter can't provide frames fast enough, essentially eliminating point 3 below.
From a gamer point of view, V-Sync does the following:
It eliminates screen tearing. At least it should; I've seen games with buggy V-Sync where turning this option on did not remove tearing entirely.
It introduces stuttering, or lag. Since your GPU now has to wait for the screen to be ready, the frame you'll see on screen will almost never be the most up to date. Most people don't notice it and/or find the screen tearing to be worse distraction than the former.
It will affect your framerate if your GPU can't match your screen's refresh rate. For instance it'll try to feed a 60 Hz screen with one frame every 16.6 ms (1/60 second). If it can't produce a frame fast enough, it'll have to wait for the screen's next refresh cycle before it can display it. If this happens frequently, i.e. your GPU can't provide frames every 16.6 ms, then your effective frame rate will bounce between integer multiples of the refresh, that is, at times it will be 30 instead of 60 for example.
As a rule of thumb:
If you're in the majority and own a typical 60 Hz display:
- If you play first-person shooter games competitively, and/or have issues with perceived input lag, and/or if your system cannot sustain at least 60 FPS in a given title, and/or you're benchmarking your graphics card, then you should turn V-sync off.
- If none of the above applies to you and you experience significant screen tearing, then you should turn V-sync on.
- As a general rule, or if you don’t feel strongly either way, just keep V-sync off.
On the other hand if you own a gaming-oriented 120/144 Hz display (if you have one, there's a good chance you bought it specifically for its higher refresh rate):
- You should consider leaving V-sync on only when playing older games, where you experience a sustained >120 FPS and you are experiencing screen tearing.
If the lag disturbs you more than the tearing, you probably want to keep it off.
If you still see tearing even with V-Sync on — such as in games where V-Sync implementation is buggy — you might want to turn it off to see if the tearing gets worse; if it doesn't, then V-Sync probably doesn't work at all (in that particular game) and there's no reason to keep it on.
