During a press conference in May, NVIDIA released new information regarding G-Sync. As we all know, G-Sync is the amazing feature that almost all of the NVIDIA graphics card range offers that provides much better visual experience for the player.
NVIDIA only give the G-Sync branding to certain panels that meet the strict quality requirements set by NVIDIA. In a traditional monitor, the GPU has to talk to the monitor through the Scaler which up or downscales the incoming image to a usable resolution and then send that information to the panel. The problem with this is that monitors have a minimum refresh rate, generally around 38-48FPS. If the game is too demanding and the FPS drops below this threshold, the user will notice a visual defect such as stuttering or even ‘artifacting’.
When G-Sync is enabled with a G-Sync monitor, the resolution is fixed to whatever the users sets it to, but the refresh rate is also ‘fixed’ to an acceptable level. This is achieved by the GPU aiming for around double the minimum refresh rate of the monitor; so if any graphic intensive scenes do occur, the panel should still be above the minimum threshold.
When it comes to colours, a traditional monitor works perfectly fine until it comes to a graphical intensive or non-intensive scene. As an example, the colour grey is used. If in a scene, the game requires a change from Grey 1 to Grey 2, the monitor will aim for Grey 3. This will be fine normally, but what if at the same time you need to change the shade, all hell breaks loose and drops the FPS to lower than 30FPS (lower than the monitors refresh rate), you may notice ghosting.
When G-Sync is enabled with variable overdrive, the colour is almost ‘predicted’. Most of the time this works, but even sometimes is can cause minor issues with colour imperfections.
Even when G-Sync is enabled, there is little to no performance penalty.
A new feature explained to us was G-Sync ‘Windowed mode’. Normally G-Sync only worked during full-screen play, but as many MMORPG players will know; you often jump in and out of full-screen or even only play in windowed mode to access how-to guides or similar.
Towards the end of the presentation, a new range of G-Sync monitors was revealed. These are mainly aimed at the 4k resolution market and offering a rarely seen 60Hz refresh rate; now to find a graphics card set up that will deliver the required performance.
