Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity
Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity
But G-Sync will still require specific G-Sync-capable MediaTek scaler chips.
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.
Open standards always win. Just buy FreeSync and get an AMD GPU.
I'll buy an AMD GPU once they have an answer to the 4090 (actually the 5090 at this point). I need AI upscaling, SDR-to-HDR conversion for videos, and way better ray tracing performance. Until that happens, my PC will unfortunately remain a mixed-breed bastard.
I need AI upscaling,
Not a hardware thing.
SDR-to-HDR conversion for videos,
Not a hardware thing.
and way better ray tracing performance.
Ray accelerators are a hardware thing. The AI to denoise them, again, not so much.
Just because AMD cards don't come with tensor cores doesn't mean they can't run AI workloads, tensor cores are essentially cut-down GPU cores. They make sense in mobile devices to save on energy consumption but on desktop? Just use the TFLOPs you have for the basic matrix math you're doing, the important bit, and that's the gather/scatter memory architecture to deal with giant matrices, GPUs also have.
Awwwwwwwww... poor nVidia loses again.
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.
VESA Adaptive-Sync goes back to the eDP stardard, 2009. AMD simply took that and said "Hey why aren't we doing that over external DisplayPort". And they did.
So instead of over-engineering a solution that nobody asked for to create vendor lock-in nobody (but fanboys with Stockholm Syndrome) want they exposed functionality that many many panels already had, anyway, because manufactures don't use completely different control circuitry for laptop (eDP) and stand-alone monitors.
And, no, nvidia's tech is not superior. From what I gather they have stricter certification requirements but that's it.
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".
TL:DR The stuff the dedicated module is doing will go inside specific Mediatek chips on specific premium monitors
Really weird it's taken this long - I remember reading that the modules were expensive and assumed it was just because they were early generations and Nvidia was still working things out
Weren't they FPGAs?
Nvidia says it's partnering with chipmaker MediaTek to build G-Sync capabilities directly into scaler chips that MediaTek is creating for upcoming monitors.
Meaning, the same in blue?
No. Nvidia will be licensing the designs to mediatek, who will build out the ASIC/silicon in their scaler boards. That solves a few different issues. For one, no FPGAs involved = big cost savings. For another, mediatek can do much higher volume than Nvidia, which brings costs down. The licensing fee is also going to be significantly lower than the combined BOM cost + licensing fee they currently charge. I assume Nvidia will continue charging for certification, but that may lead to a situation where many displays are gsync compatible and simply don't advertise it on the box except on high end SKUs.
This is why I think eventually FSR will win over DLSS in the end, despite DLSS having better performance.
Nvidia solutions only get abandoned when a superior technology takes over. See PhysX.
I think it's unlikely one of those techs "wins" at all. It's relatively easy to support them all from a software perspective and so gamers will just use whichever corresponds to their GPU.
Unless something has changed recently you still have to submit builds to Nvidia to have them train the DLSS kernel for you, so FSR is substantially easier to integrate.
Quick, sell all your Nvidia stocks!
haha. I wouldn't, but yes please sell your stocks. I will buy them. We still have a $300B inflow of AI shizzle (bubble) that goes into Nvidia.
Good for them if it help eliminate the mark up of displays advertising gsync ultimate. I have my doubts but it'd make sense if they're no longer using dedicated boards with FPGAs and RAM.
One has to wonder if VESA will further their VRR standard to support refresh rates as low as 1Hz
I'm not aware of any protocol limitations there, it's just that monitors don't bother to support refresh rates that low.
Experience at low frame rates will be choppy anyways, if it's a fixed low framerate you can use LFC without quality degradation (say for movies) and if it's a variable low framerate (where LFC causes jitter)... you should be lowering your graphics settings to get better fps. Why spend extra engineering and hardware on a capability that won't ever result in a good experience anyway?
...has it really come to this? From laughing at console people for their "cinematic FPS" to nvidia fanboys saying "my monitor supports lower framerates than yours"? Aren't we supposed to brag about our displays (pointlessly) reaching haptic fps? (that's be 1kHz btw).
Higher end phones have the capability to gear down to 1hz to save power on static representation. Would be nice to see that on notebook eDP and hell, even with dekstop monitors too.
Yeah it feels premature since so many freesync displays still only go to 48hz.
Maybe if the mediatek chip can go to 30hz then VESA will update.
I think below that range they can frame double (low framerate compensation LFC) to go as low as 24 FPS
Will the Mediatek modules also support VESA Adaptive Sync, or will they have fixed frame rate on AMD cards?
Last time i looked up Freesync vs. V-Sync, Freesync was for frequencies below 60 Htz, no?
Iirc freesync (extreme/ultimate) works down to 48fps. I use it when playing in 4k since my card struggles to keep a locked 60fps at that resolution
It works down to whatever the implementation in the monitor supports which tends to be 40 or 48fps. There's a minimum you have to support if you want the FreeSync sticker but in principle you could call it AdaptiveSync and only support down to 60 or such, or support everything down to 1fps (which doesn't happen in practice) and still call it FreeSync, AMD doesn't mind you exceeding specs.
I use freesync on my monitor between 48 and 144 hz.
The range depends on the specific monitor.
It works up to the max frequency of your monitor
So I have two Acer monitors with the dedicated G-Sync hardware, are those compatible with AMD freensync? I think both displays predate AMD freesync though.
I'm curious now that I've switched to Linux I'm running into issues with my NVIDIA GPU and Wayland suspend/hibernate functionality.
So I have two Acer monitors with the dedicated G-Sync hardware, are those compatible with AMD freensync?
Have a look at the manual but I don't think chances are good.
I’m curious now that I’ve switched to Linux I’m running into issues with my NVIDIA GPU and Wayland suspend/hibernate functionality.
Suspend/hibernate is iffy in general, doesn't necessarily have to do anything with the GPU. You'll need sufficient swap space and a BIOS which is playing nice. Aside from slogging through logs to see if anything throws particular errors you can try booting without nvidia drivers (plain VESA console if you have to) and trying to hibernate that.