Is this tearing?

[xander333]

Hi forum,

I was brwosing through my old projects folder and stumbled upon this little snake I made. I recall it running perfectly fine, but when I run it now it's very ugly:
http://tinypic.com/r/el9zc6/7
You have to watch closely. The lines between blocks are supposed to be black...
Is this tearing? And what could be the cause?

[helios]

Tearing is an artifact that results from an image in the video device being sent to the monitor while a process is still updating it, resulting in a picture that's composed by parts of two or more consecutive frames. It's called "tearing" because when the camera does a panning view, it looks as if part of the picture was being torn.
Here's an example:
http://www.girlgamer.com/site_media/thumbs/articles/2011/03/01/5-3_jpg_650x10000_q85.jpg

In your case, I'm guessing you never initialized the background to black, so the result is garbage left in memory from a previous process being sent to the display.