I have a decent MSI laptop (GeForce GTX 970M w/3GB VRAM, 16GB RAM, i7-6700HQ 64-bit) connected via HDMI to an Insignia LED TV. I've updated both Windows 10 and the NVIDIA driver to their most recent versions (September 2017).

The problem: Screen tearing - a clear/translucent horizontal line moves vertically up the screen when scrolling the Start Menu or browser, looking around or moving in games, etc. Forcing vsync and triple buffering in the NVIDIA control panel does not eliminate the screen tearing in games.

Any advice? Frustrated at this point - just want to play some games but spending all my gaming time trying to fix this problem.

So... I posted this morning out of frustration after about a week of troubleshooting. Then I took a break to clear my head and went out to buy groceries. When I came home, I tried something that I didn't think would work... But it did!

I changed the display settings in Windows to use only the TV (instead of duplicating the displays). This seems to have fixed the screen tearing. Not sure why: My previous Windows 7 laptop managed multiple displays (with this same TV) without issue. Guess Windows 10 just sucks.

Anyway... First person to reply "Have you tried restarting it?" gets free rep points since I can't mark my own post as the solution.

Just did a quick check with both extend and duplicate, and I don't have any noticeable screen tearing. Could it be that your TV and monitor's refresh rate isn't synced, thus the tearing? Do check what refresh rate your TV is using when you duplicate the displays.

Both show 60Hz in properties. The strange thing is that I don't recall any screen tearing when I played TW3 or Shadow Warrior 2 on this setup. But I hadn't been gaming recently and only just started using the laptop in earnest again.

I don't know about screen tearing or other problems with image quality, but Windows 10 absolutely does suck when it comes to multiple displays.