AOC G2460PG 24″ G-Sync Monitor Review

What Is G-Sync?

G-Sync is simply amazing, it turns unbearable tearing and stuttering during gameplay into one of the best experiences you can possibly achieve with your monitor and computer set up; that’s assuming you have a G-Sync monitor and G-Sync compliant graphics card.

Before the days of G-Sync, we had V-Sync. V-Sync came in a simple on and off format, but it was a step in the right direction. Off and you would normally experience screen tearing, this occurred when the graphics card and monitor refresh rate didn’t match perfectly and the monitor would display two or more frames at the same time. This was intolerable to most people, so V-Sync was created.

For the most part V-Sync was great, it allowed gamers to achieve a better visual experience when gaming, but it came at a price. Say you had a 60Hz monitor, a pretty standard monitor refresh rate and you are playing a game that can refresh an average of 75 frames per minute, the V-Sync software will limit the graphics card to 60FPS. Just say you get bored with that setting and you decide to turn on Anti-Aliasing to x8 from Off, your average FPS is still above 60, but every now and then you get a small dip to 50FPS; this is where the problems start. The monitor cannot refresh the display correctly if the FPS is lower than the refresh rate, so V-Sync drops the FPS to half of the refresh rate. If you are using a 60Hz monitor, that means you will be getting 30FPS until the graphics card can render the frames fast enough. This is all well and good, but that momentary instant where V-Sync kicks in, you experience a stutter.

From there, different variations of V-Sync was introduced, but nothing really took off until G-Sync was implemented by NVIDIA. Much like V-Sync, the feature caps the FPS to the monitor refresh rate. However, when the FPS drops, G-Sync then lowers the refresh rate of the monitor to match the FPS. In most cases this happens instantly, but there are instances where you experience a very small stutter for say you was at 60FPS and you hit a 15FPS section of the game due to a dense crowd.