Posted Fri Oct 18, 2013 at 09:30 AM PDT by Brian Hoss
"The refresh of the monitor now has no fixed rate."
While the problem affects certain kinds of games on all platforms, PC gamers have especially had to deal with screen tearing and the V-Sync trade-off. The solution for painful screen tearing has been to enable V-Sync, a solution which brings with it a large performance drawback (lag) and often cripples certain games. As Nvidia has explained, the problem stems from the old-fashioned 60Hz refresh rate set by the display and with V-Sync off, "any time the GPU’s FPS falls below the refresh rate of the monitor, animation stutters badly."
Today, Nvidia's announced their solution for this problem, "Instead of trying to get a GPU’s output to synchronize with a monitor refresh, what if we synchronized the monitor refresh to the GPU render rate?" That solution set, called G-Sync, will now be made available as a module built into various monitors. "With G-SYNC, the monitor begins a refresh cycle right after each frame is completely rendered on the GPU. Since the GPU renders with variable time, the refresh of the monitor now has no fixed rate."
Naturally, Nvidia describes their solution as getting everyone a little closer to gaming nirvana by eliminating tearing and stuttering. Models from manufactures like Asus, ViewSonic, BenQ, and Philips are expected soon and will work with Nvidia cards like the GTX 660.
Source: Nvidia
Author: Brian Hoss
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