However, to your second assumption, it would not help *directly* with tearing because when you flush the card all you're doing is asking it to draw stuff to the backbuffer. It's not the drawing to the backbuffer that makes things tear, it's the copy to the front buffer. However, that said, if the gfx card has to a) draw everything all at once and b) then copy to the front buffer, chances are that it would finish drawing to the front buffer *sooner* if it had already finished drawing to the backbuffer earlier in the code.
That's what I meant.I wish there was a DXFlush() ... maybe there is...
Do you know that all the tearing problems are DX only and would be fixed by updating DX, or does it apply to OpenGL as well?
mainly DX I think as I haven't done much OpenGL testing. Sorry I don't have more info. Also, do the people who get tearing in window mode, also get tearing by using a MaxGUI window?
Again, I don't know this. Skidracer was inferring it would be better to use a MaxGui canvas and event driven code, but I donn't have the time to invest in this yet. I'll see what others come up with.
Your tearing idea is cool (like manually tuning the Vsync based on your eyes because the stupid drivers can't do it!), but regretablly impractical for the average casual game player who totally won't get it. Like I said before, they'll take one look and won't bother to look for options.