Technology

59374 readers

3463 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

329

Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display's refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.

The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn't what has been driving most of that adoption. G-Sync has always required extra dedicated hardware inside of displays, increasing the costs for both users and monitor manufacturers. The VRR technology in most low-end to mid-range screens these days is usually some version of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync or the similar VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, both of which provide G-Sync's most important features without requiring extra hardware. Nvidia more or less acknowledged that the free-to-use, cheap-to-implement VRR technologies had won in 2019 when it announced its "G-Sync Compatible" certification tier for FreeSync monitors. The list of G-Sync Compatible screens now vastly outnumbers the list of G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate screens.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 120 points 2 months ago (13 children)

Awwwwwwwww... poor nVidia loses again.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (12 children)

This is silly.

Gsync solved a problem that couldn't be solved before they made it. They stayed committed to that good solution until there was an alternative that reached a reasonable level of performance, then supported both until they could get close without the expensive extra hardware.

Was it worth it? For most people no. But it's still technically superior today and there are loads of options without the extra cost.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The problem was solved by Nvidia, then AMD made it cheap and accessible and not requiring a dedicated hardware module.

For years and years Nvidia increased artificially by up to 150 euros many Gsync screens and for no legitimate reason. Initially there was NO compatibility with free sync at all.

Nvidia wasn't kindly solving a gamers problem at least to after the first year of release of that tech. They were forcibly selling expensive hardware modules nobody needed or wanted. And long after freesync showed you could do it just as well without this expensive requirements.

This hardware module they insisted on selling wasn't solving a technical problem but a money one.

I don't even think anyone was ever able to differentiate between the different qualities of "sync techs".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

There absolutely was a legitimate reason. The hardware was not capable of processing the signals. They didn't use FPGAs on a whim. They did it because they were necessary to handle the signals properly.

And you just haven't followed the tech if you think they were indistinguishable. Gsync has supported a much wider variance of frame times over its entire lifespan.

load more comments (10 replies)