I'm running an animation in a WinForms app at 18.66666... frames per second (it's synced with music at 140 BPM, which is why the frame rate is weird). Each cel of the animation is pre-calculated, and the animation is driven by a high-resolution multimedia timer. The animation itself is smooth, but I am seeing a significant amount of "tearing", or artifacts that result from cels being caught partway through a screen refresh.

When I take the set of cels rendered by my program and write them out to an AVI file, and then play the AVI file in Windows Media Player, I do not see any tearing at all. I assume that WMP plays the file smoothly because it uses DirectX (or something else) and is able to synchronize the rendering with the screen's refresh activity. It's not changing the frame rate, as the animation stays in sync with the audio.

Is this why WMP is able to render the animation without tearing, or am I missing something? Is there any way I can use DirectX (or something else) in order to enable my program to be aware of where the current scan line is, and if so, is there any way I can use that information to eliminate tearing without actually using DirectX for displaying the cels? Or do I have to fully use DirectX for rendering in order to deal with this problem?

Update: forgot a detail. My app renders each cell onto a PictureBox using Graphics.DrawImage. Is this significantly slower than using BitBlt, such that I might eliminate at least some of the tearing by using BitBlt?