Reliably synchronising SDL animation with VSYNC in windowed mode

Question

I have an SDL/OpenGL program which creates a rendering context with PRESENTVSYNC enabled, then enters an animation loop which calls SDL_GL_SwapWindow each time around. On my own machine, the animation works fine at a sensible speed, but on my office machine it runs with no vsync delay at all resulting in the animation running at breakneck speed and tearing all over the frame. Adding a sleep() to the animation loop slows it down sensibly.

I know that I can use SDL_GL_GetSwapInterval to see if swapping is being synchronized or not, but is there a way to find out what the actual refresh rate of the screen is in order to know how long or short the sleep should be?

Answer 1

You need to use SDL_GL_SetSwapInterval. Pass in 1 to enable VSYNC.

SDL_PRESENT_VSYNC is a SDL_Renderer flag and has no effect on pure OpenGL rendering. It only affects rendering performed using the SDL's rendering module.

Answer 2

You can use SDL_GetDisplayMode or SDL_GetCurrentDisplayMode, which will copy data into an SDL_DisplayMode you pass it, including the screen's refresh rate.

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_GetDisplayMode