Nvidia Unleashes G-Sync to Eliminate Screen Tearing and Stuttering for Good

Nvidia has announced a new technology that promises to virtually eliminate screen tearing. Screen tearing and stuttering occurs when the framerate is either too high for you monitor or there is a jump in frames (ex. 30 to 60/80 FPS). Currently, GPUs fire frames out as fast as possible regardless of the monitor’s refresh rate. Vsync prevents a tear (two separate frames shown at once) by limiting and delaying the amount of frames. However, if there is a jump in frames below this FPS cap slight stuttering can still occur.

As a result, Nvidia has come up with a solution to solve all of these problems. The solution is called G-Sync. G-Sync is implemented both via hardware and software. How it works is a daughter board is placed within a monitor. This makes the monitor act as a slave to the GPU. This hardware module causes the monitor’s refresh rate to become variably dependent on the GPU’s frame rate/performance.

The only major downside is that you have to have a G-Sync supported monitor and GPU. So, if you invest in an expensive monitor and are banking on G-Sync to work with an AMD GPU, you may be out of luck for the foreseeable future, for this is a Nvidia proprietary technology. It could in fact be possible that monitors will come packaged with both a G-Sync board and a similar AMD board.

On the plus side, future plans are already in action to embed the technology into IPS and 4K displays. And, the technology will be available within monitors later this year and will be compatible with 6 and 7 series GPUs (no mention of 5 series yet). Thus, this allows monitors’ static refresh rate and GPUs’ dynamic frame rate to become completely synced and will eliminate screen tearing and stuttering completely.

Source: Guru3D.com