ofSetVerticalSync– what does it do exactly?

It synchronizes the redraw of the screen to the vertical refresh of your screen. The monitor or projector redraws the screen at usually 60 frames per second. If you don't enable the vertical sync your application runs as fast as possible and the screen can be drawing half of one frame and half of the previous, getting an effect called tearing

to avoid it you synchronize the update / draw of your app with the refresh of the screen.

By default since 0.8.0 vsync is enabled you can disable it calling ofSetVerticalSync(false)

If you draw the frame rate of the application you can see how the app runs at 60fps usually with vsync enabled and way faster without it

Screen tearing

Screen tearing is a visual artifact in video display where a display device shows information from two or more frames in a single screen draw. The artifact occurs when the video feed to the device isn't in sync with the display's refresh. This can be due to non-matching refresh rates—in which case the tear line moves as the phase difference changes (with speed proportional to difference of frame rates). It can also occur simply from lack of sync between two equal frame rates, in which case the te...