'Freesync', 'G-Sync', Monitors, Laptops, refresh rates and gaming

[Millennium]

Hey All

I have been doing some reading and watching videos recently and come across a bit of a bombshell.

In this review of an expensive non full colour monitor the reviewer mentions (and highlights) how much difference he finds g-sync makes to pc gaming :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71SO...1obEQL6EyiAq0w

N-vidia are marketing something they are calling g-sync and there are details here:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphic...h-Refresh-Rate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhLYYYvFp9A

However! AMD have pointed out that this ability (as they see it I assume) is already available in the VESA specifications and they are highlighting it with something they are calling freesync :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uoD...1obEQL6EyiAq0w

Problem seems to be that desktop monitors currently don't work well with this due to their design, and so Displayport 1.2a will come along ...
http://techreport.com/news/26451/ada...splayport-spec

Hang on though! We all know how important it is for a PC to send a frame to a screen at maximal speed for games, and for all these years even with the DVI / HDMI standard have all of our screens been leaving us putting up with extra latency on display of each frame anyway? Is this also the case with all current and past consoles and all flat panel displays up to the rare handful this year ??! I'm quite shocked to (as it seems) be learning this now, and it leaves me wondering how exactly this became 'ok' for people spending 400-1600 pounds on a PC gaming system, or up to 400 on a console, and a further 150-1000 pounds on a digital flat display .








It's great news that this is getting fixed of course, but I wouldn't want to see only one GPU vendor fixing this so my assumption would be the industry would try and agree and we might in a few years see monitors advertising latency free sync specifications and graphics cards doing the same (perhaps the same way that V92.bis came from K56Flex and USR X2 for modems ). It gives me quite serious pause though to find that even with vsync off in games software *there's been notable latency on digital displays for perhaps over a decade now* .

my IPS monitor is staying put (laggy in itself or not) and my GPU is not being upgraded (290x upgrade too lofty a goal and too expensive and wasteful a proposition now - 280x won't do freesync) and I'm going to have a sulk for a few years .

hexus - damn.

[KeyboardDemon]

The main problem with trying to get consistent results from a monitor when playing games has always been that games don't run with consistent frame rates. As soon as the polygon count increases the frames per seconds drops or more importantly the time it takes to draw each frame increases. In consoles the solution has been to run with a fixed frame of 30 frames per second by optimizing the graphics settings during the development in order to ensure that the game can work consistently at that rate, this is helped as the hardware remains the same on any given platform.

The PC solutions have been harder as they usually introduce other issues such as input lag, tearing, stuttering etc... depending on the solution implemented and of course the different hardware configurations mean that a single optimized solution won't work. G-Sync puts hardware into the monitor to allow it to sync with the GPU instead of forcing the GPU to try and sync with the screen but this means that nVidia's solution requires additional hardware. Freesync on the other hand is a solution where the ability to sync the screen to the GPU output will be built in to any monitor that has a Displayport 1.2a compliant input, and this at the moment, is the solution that I think makes the most sense. G-Sync was announced somewhere around October 2013 IIRC while Freesync was introduced at CES (I think) in January this year.

I came very close to buying that Asus monitor when it launched, in fact I had it on pre-order but have been holding off due to doubts over both the technology and the resolution that I want to use, if I stick with G-Sync then I'll be forced in to staying with nVidia cards for the life of the monitor at least and if I go with Freesync I might end up finding that nVidia won't support it and then I would end up having to change my current GPU, neither solution makes sense to me, so I am waiting until I have enough information to make an informed decision.

[kalniel]

Glad you could catch up with the rest of us

Well it's all CRTs fault. Or at least, LCDs pretending to be CRTs. If we'd got with a clean new model it'd be fine, but we're still stuck trying to pretend to be CRTs and patching up the consequences.

[jim]

Glad you could catch up with the rest of us

Well it's all CRTs fault. Or at least, LCDs pretending to be CRTs. If we'd got with a clean new model it'd be fine, but we're still stuck trying to pretend to be CRTs and patching up the consequences.

Do you mean because we're still going on about refresh rates, which is something particular to CRT? I really don't know much about the actual tech behind screens, interested as to what you're getting at.

[csgohan4]

I was about the ASUS ROG monitor. however I held off, all the more for 4K monitors too. the current Technology is too new (therefore expensive) and the GPU's still cannot produce a decent frame rate for 4K gameplay.

Personally I am going to wait for a year or too and let the GPU's Catch up and see what happens. Might even switch to the DDR4 CPUs too as well then

[kalniel]

Do you mean because we're still going on about refresh rates, which is something particular to CRT? I really don't know much about the actual tech behind screens, interested as to what you're getting at.

The idea of building a whole screen frame by frame, which is then buffered and sent to a monitor (for the electron gun to scan down the phosphor in a CRT in one pass). There's no need to either build whole frames on LCDs or to refresh them - we should just be updating the individual pixels as and when they need it.. but when we moved to LCD we just replicated how CRTs work. It's a lot of wasted effort on the GPU and for monitors.

[KeyboardDemon]

The idea of building a whole screen frame by frame, which is then buffered and sent to a monitor (for the electron gun to scan down the phosphor in a CRT in one pass). There's no need to either build whole frames on LCDs or to refresh them - we should just be updating the individual pixels as and when they need it.. but when we moved to LCD we just replicated how CRTs work. It's a lot of wasted effort on the GPU and for monitors.

So if this is the case why is no one trying to fix this problem, or are we too far down the line to turn back now?