Hello all! I am having some awful issues running Skyrim. To start with, I have a Phenom II X4 970 and an HD7970. Neither of which are overclocked. I am only running a couple weapon and armor mods along with Flora overhaul and 2k textures. But I was still having this problem on vanilla Skyrim.
Anyways, the game runs great, no problem keeping a steady 60fps. But as soon as there is a light source I get super bad screen tearing. I have v-sync turned on in CCC and in the ini file. I also have the frames limited to 60 with Afterburner. It doesn't seem to help though. The second I get to a bright area the screen tearing starts up again. It's driving me absolutely insane and I've spent the past week trying to fix it.
It's even bothering my wife and she never gives a crap about any of this graphical stuff.
Any suggestions?

Have you tried reinstalling your video card drivers? Which driver version are you currently using?

I'm running 13.11. This is the only game I've ever had this issue with other than Metro. But that seemed to be a problem for everyone. I see they just released 13.12, so I'll give that a go.

Try to enable Triple buffering on your CCC panel.

Dude, trust me. I have tried everything I can to fix this. I've forced vsync, used triple buffer, ran it on the lowest settings, no AF, no AA, etc. Nothing seems to help. It's a little unsettling.

I just swapped my card with my old 7850 and had the same problem.... *sigh*
I wish somebody in my area had an Nvidia card I could try out to see if it's just an AMD issue.

Have you tried using Afterburner to set a lower frame rate ? I have mine capped at 58 (due to micro stutter).

I have an Nvidia card.

--------------------

It is advisable to ask some opinions from ati users, as nvidia card's have a different architecture, and completely different drivers as ati GPU's.

And amd GPU's may not be able to force v-sync the same way as Nvidia GPU's do. !!!!!!

Try the http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/34/? over at the Nexus.
This and other odd problems happen when the FPS in Skyrim gets too high.

It fixed the problems for me when this began happening just after the 1.9 Skyrim Patch.

It needs SKSE to work.

If only you were on the western slope of CO. lol.
With all the googling I've done to try and figure out the problem I appear to be a unique case. I couldn't find any other posts relating to the problem I'm having. This is the only game I've ever had this issue with.
I've tried using different outputs on my card between two different monitors with no luck. Next step is to completely re install Skyrim. I'll post how that goes.