What's wrong with my graphics?

For the past few days I've been feeling a little bit disturbed when playing games. Whenever I made swipped my mouse from one side to another, the edges would look a little bit weird. Some frames aren't complete frames and are kinda merged with another frame. This example should help explain a little bit:



Ignore the poor quality of the image...if you look carefully around the middle, you would be able to see that it displays part of another frame on the screen. This isn't an actual screenshot taken. I made it by overlapping one frame over the other...but it does help explain what I'm seeing.

Also, I just noticed that I'm not having any motion blur at all even when it's enabled! Does anyone know what might be wrong?

I'm using a Penryn Macbook Pro with a 8600M GT in it.

 

Well, first of all what your seeing is caused by the reaction time of your monitor I believe. But im not too sure; certain parts of the screen dont react as fast as others, causing the breakup of the image and giving you those ridges.
Theres something you can do against this apart from getting a monitor with a reaction time under 5 ms, and that is enabling V-sync. This will match the FPS to your monitor's speed. FPS will be lower, but you wont get any ridges. (usually v-sync locks FPS at 30 I believe)

 

Well...I'm feeling like quite an idiot now though. I just tried it on my desktop and it looks exactly the same. I recently changed from Vista to XP and apparently now I can't seem to notice motion blur anymore...?

 

Turn v-sync on in the games video settings, and it should clear right up. Worked for me for everything but Gears of War.... but Gears of War is just broken, I think.

And motion blur should still be there.... although I always thought it was a little subtle.

 

I read that DX10 makes motion blur more pronounced...so I was thinking if that has to do anything with it, as I used to play under Vista.

I have V-Sync on by the way...it's probably because I'm used to motion blur being more obvious.

 

Well, the game only runs in DX9 anyway... but idk, I never really noticed motion blur that much in Portal or TF2 either way. And btw, v-sync won't cap you to 30fps. Probably caps at 60, which is, I think, the max I get in TF2.

 

That's what I was wondering too....but I swear it used to be really obvious to me in Vista, and now I can't even seem to notice it on either my desktop or notebook (both XP) without taking a screenshot.

 

V-Sync usually caps framerate at 30 FPS when over 30 but under 60, and caps at 60 FPS when over 60 of course. It's probably the screen either ghosting or possibly a combination of many things including screen tearing which can happen whether V-sync is on or not. There is no real telling, especially you being on a Mac Pro, which uses EFI, not a BIOS, and the fact that Vista uses a specialized version of Direct X 9 called 9.0L for games that use DX9.