"Line" or something during PC gaming... what causes it?

It's hard to describe, but I've often noticed there's a line - not a string of same-colored pixels, but like a divide, aberration, something when I play PC games. It's not artifacting or anything like that, but just almost as if on an old TV the vertical hold was funny.

Man, I can't describe it - suffice it to say it's not something like poor hardware or an error - my frame rate is rock solid and details and all the other business are doing well. If this makes any sense to anyone and there's a name or something for it, I'd like to hear your thoughts. I'll try and describe it better if I can think of a way to do it...

You're probably noticing screen tearing.

If it's bothering you, you can enable V-Sync in the video options of most games, and that should fix it. If possible, you should also enable triple buffering when V-Sync is enabled.

Screen tearing is it. Thanks!

Is that due to bad/underpowered hardware?

Is that due to bad/underpowered hardware?jazztrumpet5

Nope. It's just something that happens with certain combined framerate and refresh rate ranges. You see it with all types of hardware, it just bothers some people more than others (I notice tearing from time to time, but it doesn't bother me, so I never use V-Sync.)