What is g-sync?

[Walt]

Hi everyone,

It's maybe a dumb question but what does a g-sync monitor do better (together witch a gtx GPU) then a normal monitor? 
Thanks!

[dizmo]

Google's a wonderful thing.

 

 

[SeanAngelo]

2 minutes ago, Walt said:

Hi everyone,

It's maybe a dumb question but what does a g-sync monitor do better (together witch a gtx GPU) then a normal monitor? 
Thanks!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-g-sync-make-graphics-look-prettier/

[Princess Luna]

G-Sync is an extremely expensive feature for extremely expensive monitors that makes gaming slightly more smoother than if using conventional Fast-Sync / V-Sync Triple Buffered.

 

You do not need it in my personal view.

[DocSwag]

Basically, it syncs up your monitors refresh rate with the fps your gpu is outputting.

 

This fixes some issues that can normally be had. If you're gaming and, say, you're gpu is outputting 40 fps but your monitor is a 60 hz monitor you're going to end up with tearing. This is basically when your monitor tries to display two different frames in each of its cycles resulting in the screen being sort of torn in half, like this.

 

There is a way to fix this, however, and it's called v sync. It basically forces your monitor to wait until the gpu is done outputting a frame before displaying it. However, it can lead to stuttering when something like this happens.

Since v sync waits until the frame is fully "made" before outputting it, in this case frame 2 wasn't fully outputted before the monitor finished refresh 2. Because of this, v sync made the monitor wait until refresh 3 to output that frame. This gets rid of the annoying tearing, but also results in stuttering because in refresh 2 you saw the same thing as refresh 1.

 

So how do things like g sync fix this? By synchronizing gpu and monitor fps and refresh rate.

Basically, it makes the monitor sync up its refresh rate with your GPU's fps. So in this case, if the gpu took a bit longer to output frame 3, instead of getting tearing (with v sync off) or stuttering (with v sync on), you get neither.

 

(ignore the fact that the past two slides were from amd and about freesync. I thought that amd's slides explain it much better than Nvidia and freesync and g sync both do the same thing, so it's the same concept)

 

[Ordinarily_Greater]