The screen being rotated makes the tearing issue. You see the screen is set up to be natively addressed at 90degrees to its current use: in other words, the screen is rotated to the right, and then software is used to bring things horizontal. This software fix is causing the tearing - the solution is to use the screen in its original, non-offset way, and then use GLES to accelerate the rotation back 90 degrees to the horizontal. Weird, yes, but a compromise was made and just not very well fixed in the final implementation .. good thing the Wiz hacker elite figured out what the problem was and came up with a suitable fix ..