Nvidia G-SYNC

homerdog said:
I've decided to purchase a G-sync monitor as soon as they are available. I am very sensitive to latency and tearing; this will transform my gaming experience.
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Man.. just buy a Xonar U1 before all that.
 
I was reading reviews of the Eizo Fortis *VA 120hz monitor with non-lightboost-branded scanning backlight tech., and immediately thought of G-Sync. I hope that Nvidia pushes this tech on some of the non-TN companies. Since you can now get a 23-24" IPS or IPS-like monitor for close to $200, I hope someone can make a scanning backlight, G-Sync non-TN 120hz+ monitor in 2014.
 
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glad to see it work so well. But it seems the actual monitor quality is a step back (tn panels yuck) I am happy with my current AOC 3x24 inch monitor set up (all ips) . I hope NVidia continues working on this and maybe making it a standard anyone can use even amd and intel. But I will keep my eye out for this when 4k panels are affordable.
 
Im not as big a fan of this as I was initially.

1. Doesn't work with lightboost so it's 3D or gsync = fail.
2. Supported by only 1 monitor at present
3. Way overpriced for what it is
4. Of dubious benefit for people with 120-144hz monitors who play with vsync off (although I'd love to be convinced of otherwise
5. This wasn't clear in the reviews but it sounds like it might actually make the sub 30fps experience worse??

As the tech develops 1, 2, 3 and 5 if it's real may be solvable but until then I'm having trouble getting too excited.
 
It's mixed, but I'm still interested overall.

No argument on the price, but presumably that will come down as it gains some traction. Presumably we'll also see it paired with higher quality panels.

pjbliverpool said:
4. Of dubious benefit for people with 120-144hz monitors who play with vsync off (although I'd love to be convinced of otherwise
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I'm not sure I buy that argument... v-sync off is obviously worse quality and the entire point is to get us back into a tear-free scenario. High refresh rate monitors actually suffer worse from this problem since they are much less likely to be able to hit full v-sync rates than 60Hz monitors. If you're > refresh rate, you don't need g-sync at all.

pjbliverpool said:
5. This wasn't clear in the reviews but it sounds like it might actually make the sub 30fps experience worse??
Click to expand...
I don't see why it would... below 30Hz it's exactly the same as v-sync as far as I can tell. Obviously if you are running into that range frequently it's going suck regardless.

My biggest issue is actually the full screen exclusive mode requirement. I suppose we'll need OS support to fix that one, but until it works in (borderless) windowed mode, I just can't get too overly excited about it. Full screen exclusive mode feels pretty dated at this point.
 
Do people actually play in non-full screen mode? I thought that was still the normal way of doing thing? (Exposing my ignorance obviously!)
 
silent_guy said:
Do people actually play in non-full screen mode? I thought that was still the normal way of doing thing? (Exposing my ignorance obviously!)
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It's more borderless "full-screen" that is relevant. To the OS, it is technically windowed mode, but the window covers the whole screen and has no border, so visually it looks just like full screen mode. However, it enables seamless alt-tab, notifications, better multi-monitor and just generally interacts a whole lot more nicely with the rest of the PC. The majority of PC gamers I know prefer it over fairly nasty mode transitions and classic "full screen exclusive".
 
Andrew Lauritzen said:
I'm not sure I buy that argument... v-sync off is obviously worse quality and the entire point is to get us back into a tear-free scenario. High refresh rate monitors actually suffer worse from this problem since they are much less likely to be able to hit full v-sync rates than 60Hz monitors. If you're > refresh rate, you don't need g-sync at all.
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I understand the theory but I can honestly say I haven't noticed a jot of tearing on my monitor as long as the frame rate remains under 120fps, and I'm usually reasonably sensitive to that sort of thing. In fact since the gsync announcement I've been looking out for it but I'm still not seeing anything. Also, wouldn't vsync work the same on a 120hz monitor as a 60hz monitor? i.e. if your running at anywhere between 60-120fps you'll just lock/sync at 60fps.

I don't see why it would... below 30Hz it's exactly the same as v-sync as far as I can tell. Obviously if you are running into that range frequently it's going suck regardless.
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I'm still not quite clear how it works. Obviously with vsync you drop down to 15fps but with gsync, wouldn't the new frame be displayed as soon as it's ready? So if your frame takes 45ms to render the monitor would display your previous frame for 33ms then re-display that frame for another 12ms until the new frame is ready at which point it would repeat the process again? So in fact you're average time between new frames being displayed is 45ms rather than the 66ms it would be with vsync?

Or I could just be completely misunderstanding it

My biggest issue is actually the full screen exclusive mode requirement. I suppose we'll need OS support to fix that one, but until it works in (borderless) windowed mode, I just can't get too overly excited about it. Full screen exclusive mode feels pretty dated at this point.
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Interesting, does that work with 3D? I've never even considered borderless windowed mode before, I'll have to give it a try.
 
Andrew Lauritzen said:
It's more borderless "full-screen" that is relevant. To the OS, it is technically windowed mode, but the window covers the whole screen and has no border, so visually it looks just like full screen mode. However, it enables seamless alt-tab, notifications, better multi-monitor and just generally interacts a whole lot more nicely with the rest of the PC. The majority of PC gamers I know prefer it over fairly nasty mode transitions and classic "full screen exclusive".
Click to expand...

Borderless windowed is really nice but I wish developers wouldn't lock it to my monitors full-screen resolution. It's handy in some situations to be able to alter the resolution and hence aspect ratio as that often determines the FOV you get. Valve do it the right way with their source engine games allowing you to set the width and height of the borderless window.

More options are better than less here. :)
 
pjbliverpool said:
4. Of dubious benefit for people with 120-144hz monitors who play with vsync off (although I'd love to be convinced of otherwise
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Anand tested that and found it is better with G.Sync at 144MHz than with V.Sync , as it removes stuttering caused by repeated frames.

5. This wasn't clear in the reviews but it sounds like it might actually make the sub 30fps experience worse??
Click to expand...
Yes it does, as the screen will start pumping repeated frames to avoid flickering, It's actually a technicality as NVIDIA manipulates the intervals between each screen draw, prolonging it if the next frame isn't ready by the GPU, the longest it can hold is 33.33ms .

There is also a small overhead (about 3% hit to the frames) when enabling G.Sync. Obviously this becomes more of a problem at low fps, NV says it will iron out this problem down the line.
 
CaptainGinger said:
Borderless windowed is really nice but I wish developers wouldn't lock it to my monitors full-screen resolution.
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Ultimately I think the decoupled 3D resolution (sub/super-sampling) settings that have started to show up in stuff like Battlefield 4 and others is the right solution. Never mode change, always run borderless windowed. Adjust performance by just scaling the 3D resolution (statically or dynamically), upsample and always composite UI on at full res. Windows 8.1 can even do the last few steps in the display hardware in certain cases.

Hopefully folks are working with the OS vendors to enable g-sync natively and in situations like these. As nice as it sounds, I'm not ready to give up borderless windowed mode games for it.
 
Andrew Lauritzen said:
Ultimately I think the decoupled 3D resolution (sub/super-sampling) settings that have started to show up in stuff like Battlefield 4 and others is the right solution. Never mode change, always run borderless windowed.
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I agree with you in theory. But in practice it means breaking various high-end features. Not just G-Sync, but also CF/SLI (neither of which work well with windowed modes). I'm not sure there's a good solution to that right now.
 
Ryan Smith said:
I agree with you in theory. But in practice it means breaking various high-end features. Not just G-Sync, but also CF/SLI (neither of which work well with windowed modes). I'm not sure there's a good solution to that right now.
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My care level for CF/SLI as it currently stands approaches zero... even if someone gave me a second card for free I don't think I'd put it in :) Just too much of a gigantic mess. Possibly Mantle and explicit control over the two GPUs will change that, but that would also be fundamentally more compatible with windowed mode and so on.

G-sync at least is exciting, just don't like the current caveat.

I guess that's the rub... things that play poorly with the OS/driver model are increasingly a poor trade-off for me, no matter how cool they are.
 
I see the Asus VG248QE is on sale for $250 after promo code on Newegg right now. This is the fabled monitor that supports the gsync upgrade module, but apparently it is not possible to purchase the upgrade module from anywhere. I would order right now if I could get the gsync experience for ~$300, which is more than I've ever paid for a monitor by the way - even the nice 1080p 23" IPS NEC panel I'm using now. And if you search for "gsync" under monitors on Newegg, nothing comes up. Guess gsync isn't very useful after all.
 
homerdog said:
I see the Asus VG248QE is on sale for $250 after promo code on Newegg right now. This is the fabled monitor that supports the gsync upgrade module, but apparently it is not possible to purchase the upgrade module from anywhere. I would order right now if I could get the gsync experience for ~$300, which is more than I've ever paid for a monitor by the way - even the nice 1080p 23" IPS NEC panel I'm using now. And if you search for "gsync" under monitors on Newegg, nothing comes up. Guess gsync isn't very useful after all.
Click to expand...

It's like that tech was meant for reviewers only.
The official plan to get it is to ship your monitor to a specific company (there's one in the UK for instance to serve all european customers) and have them put the module in.
So you have to track back the company that does G-Sync integration in your part of the world and ask them before you buy that monitor. Not very practical or cheap.

Maybe playing at v-sync off 144Hz is quite enough anyway.
 
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