Pygame Movement Stuttering

Question

When I try to move Surface in Pygame, it seems to stutter in a weird way. Even when I use dt, the movement speed is not constant. Even thought FPS oscilate around 59-61, the Surface sometimes moves just a few, pixels and sometimes makes a big jump ahead. Theres no visible lag, or pause between the frames. I've seen this problem occur in many Pygame projects.

I haven't found any working fix to this problem, except using higher framerate rates.

import pygame

# setup
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

# start position of rect
x = 0
dt = 0

running = True
while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False

    # move react
    x += 200 * dt

    # refresh
    screen.fill("black")
    # draw rect on Surface
    pygame.draw.rect(screen, "white", (x, 200, 50, 50))
    # flip
    pygame.display.flip()

    dt = clock.tick(60) / 1000

outendesigns · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-29 16:59:11Z

2

The stuttering could be due to a specific combination of computer and monitor. It may be more noticeable to you than others depending on your CPU, graphics card, and the display refresh rate of your monitor. So others may not see it at all when running the same code.

That being said, try including the following in your display init. This tends to smooth things out.

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600), pygame.SCALED, vsync=1)

answered 6 hours ago

outendesigns

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