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.
They always win, unless they don’t. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.
Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.
Up until relatively recently, it was great to see that Vulkan and DX12 were in a practically even split.
Still great to see that some of the best talent in terms of visual fideltiy showcases Vulkan, like rdr2 (originally defaulted to dx12, now vulkan), doom eternal and so on. Fully expect the next GTA to.
stadia was derp but it forced interested publishers to get acquainted with vk. I think it ended up doing more good for the industry in the end as a failure, rather than harm by succeeding and locking subscribers into such a restrictive game “ownership” paradigm.
OpenGL is a bit more complicated since it’s more than just a specification in practical terms. The documentation and tooling for OpenGL was really awful compared to Direct3D. This is a huge issue when developers are working on implementing features. For instance, the documentation for glReadPixels is incorrect for years and you would have to refer to the wiki for it instead. Yet, the only way you would know this is if you scoured the internet and happened to find a StackOverflow page asking about symptoms that may not even match your issue.
Thankfully, Vulkan seems to be a lot better in this regard but I still curse the heavens everytime I need to go back to OpenGL when supporting older hardware.
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.
If there are software alternatives that allow me to automatically AI upscale and convert to HDR any video I play in any program, streaming or local (and it just works automatically in everything with no effort on my part), then please share download links with me. Until then I’ll stick with Nvidia GPUs.
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.
Gsync modules have a lower sync window before LFC kicks in (usually around 30), and faster pixel response (overdrive) anywhere in the sync window. Those are benefits for both high framerate content and low framerate content.
Even today freesync usually bottoms out around 48. That constantly puts you at the LFC boundary for a lot of AAA games if youre on a popular midrange graphics card and aiming for 60fps average.
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”.
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.
They could literally just transition to Vulkan with a Metal wrapper for pre-existing software ate any time but no, they have to keep their ecosystem locked down for some reason.
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
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.
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.
