System News
The VRR standards war is over, and Mark Williams is relieved.
For almost five years now, the variable refresh rate (VRR) wars have been waged. G-Sync versus FreeSync. Nvidia versus AMD (and the rest of the industry). Open standard versus closed proprietary.
The initial four years of VRR technology had Nvidia’s G-Sync technology pitted against VESA’s open standard Adaptive-Sync, which AMD branded ‘FreeSync’. The result was a whole bunch of vendor lock-in and confusion for early adopters, as both technologies did the same thing and used the same connectors, but were completely incompatible with each other.
G-Sync technology is certainly superior – or at least more stringent – in terms of monitor panel performance metrics required before a G-Sync sticker can be officially bestowed. Not only this, but G-Sync does do some extra processing, giving it features that the more passive Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync simply cannot. The first and most important difference is that G-Sync supports refresh rates all the way down to zero fps, which, when your system is struggling to pump out frames, makes VRR all the more important to image motion smoothness by displaying each frame as soon as it becomes available, and also employing Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) when appropriate to keep the sense of motion smooth by displaying a frame twice.
Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync monitors, on the other hand, have a far less stringent certification process, making for a bit of a wild west when it comes to frame rate ranges that are supported by each monitor. Most of the cheaper ones have quite a narrow range, from about 50Hz up to only 75Hz whereas better ones can be from 30Hz up to 240Hz. The newer FreeSync 2 standard removed the low-end refresh limits and added wider colour gamuts and luminosity to better support HDR. FreeSync 2 has brought the specification closer to G-Sync’s capabilities but doesn’t quite match it for that out of the box experience. Something G-Sync owners must pay the privilege for, as all G-Sync monitors require extra scalar module hardware, adding a significant premium to the price.
With VESA’s Adaptive-Sync being good enough in most situations, though, and Intel declaring that it’ll support Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync on its products, and the sheer price difference between otherwise similar G-Sync and FreeSync monitors ($200 to $300 extra), Nvidia was always going to be standing by itself against the rest of the tech industry’s momentum. Nvidia may have been first to market with VRR, but it made the mistake of not making it compatible enough or open licensed enough to sustain the initial momentum.
At CES 2019 Nvidia announced that it’ll start supporting FreeSync monitors on its graphics cards through a G-Sync Compatible certification program, and manually in the drivers for non-certified monitors, opening GeForce owners up to a wider VRR monitor market. This was the first sign that Nvidia was cracking under the pressure of its lack of standards compatibility, and just 11 months later in November, Nvidia announced that it’ll be baking in support for AdaptiveSync/FreeSync into its very own G-Sync scalar modules so that any G-Sync monitor can also support VRR on any other GPU, console or device without the requirement of an Nvidia GPU. Nvidia has admitted defeat.
Unfortunately, this support will only be available on new monitors manufactured after that date and marked on the box as such as only new G-Sync scalar modules will get support. Older G-Sync monitors won’t get any firmware updates.
Everyone is a winner now with VRR equipment. All GPUs will work with any VRR monitor no matter which standard they natively support, and it also allows Nvidia to nurture and improve its G-Sync ecosystem, adding features or support separately to Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync allowing Nvidia to keep pushing it as the premium VRR option, but consumers will no longer be left deciding to go with and being stuck with any one particular GPU maker after they’ve bought a VRR monitor, which should do wonders for VRR market penetration and uptake. VRR for everyone!