NVIDIA’s G-SYNC is the Business.

If there’s one thing that I can’t stand in any game it’s visual tearing and stuttering. This is the main reason why I play all my games with v-sync on as whilst I, like any gamer, enjoy the higher frame rates that come with turning it off it’s not long before I’m turning it back on again after the visual tearing wreaks havoc on my visual experience. Unfortunately this has the downside of requiring me to over-spec my machine to ensure 60 FPS at all times (something which I do anyway, but it doesn’t last forever) or lowering the visual quality of the game, something which no one wants. It’s been an issue for so long that I had given up on a fix for it although there was some hope with a 120Hz monitor. As it turns out there is hope and its name is G-SYNC.

The technology comes by way of NVIDIA and it’s a revolutionary way of having the GPU and your monitor work in tandem to remove tearing and stuttering. Traditionally when you’re operating a monitor like I am your graphics card has to wait for the monitor’s refresh interval every time it wants to write a frame to it. In a highly variable frame rate game (which is anything that’s graphically intensive) this leads to stuttering where repeated frames give the appearance of the game freezing up. Flipping v-sync off leads to the other problem where the GPU can write frames to the monitor whenever it wants. This means that a new frame can start being written halfway through a scan cycle which, if there’s even a skerrick of motion, leads to the frames being out of alignment causing visual tears. G-SYNC allows the GPU to dictate when the monitor should refresh, eliminating both these issues as every frame is synced perfectly.

For me this is basically monitor nirvana as it gives me the advantages of running v-sync without any of the drawbacks. Better still all the monitors that support G-SYNC also run up to 144Hz, something which was going to be a requirement for my next monitor purchase. The only drawback that I see currently is that all these high refresh rate monitors are TN panels which aren’t as great when compared to the shiny new IPS panels that have been flooding the market recently. Honestly though I’m more than willing to trade off the massive resolution and better colour reproduction for solving my main visual gripe that’s plagued me for the better part of 20 years.

Unfortunately your options for getting a G-SYNC capable monitor right now are fairly limited. Whilst there are a good number of monitors that were recently announced as supporting G-SYNC none of them have become commercially available yet, with all of them scheduled for release in Q2 2014. You can, if you’re so inclined, purchase an ASUS VG248QE and then hit up NVIDIA directly for a G-SYNC upgrade kit (currently out of stock) and upgrade your monitor yourself but it will require you to crack it open in order to do so. There are places that will do this for you though but they too are out of stock. Still for something like this I’m more than willing to wait and, hopefully, it will mean that other components of my new computer build will come down a touch, enough to justify the extra expenditure on these new fangled monitors.