For us long time PC gamers, those of us who grew up in a time where games were advancing so fast that yearly upgrades were a given, getting the most bang for your buck was often our primary concern. Often the key components would get upgraded first like the CPU, RAM and GPU with other components falling by the wayside. However over the past few years technological advances for some pieces of technology, like SSDs, provided such a huge benefit that they became the upgrade that everyone wanted. Now I believe I’ve found the next upgrade everyone else should get and comes to us via NVIDIA’s new monitor technology: G-Sync.
For the uninitiated G-Sync is a monitor technology from NVIDIA that allows the graphics card (which must a NVIDIA card) to directly control the refresh rate of your monitor. This allows the graphics card to write each frame to the monitor as soon as its available, dynamically altering the refresh rate to match the frame rate. G-Sync essentially allows you to have the benefits of having vsync turned off and on at the same time as there’s no frame tearing and no stutter or slowdown. As someone who can’t stand either of those graphical artefacts G-Sync sounded like the perfect technology for me and now that I’m the proud owner of a GTX970 and two AOC G2460PGs I think that position is justified.
After getting the drivers installed and upping the refresh rate to 144Hz (more on that in a sec) the NVIDIA control panel informed me that I had G-Sync capable monitors and, strangely, told me to go enable it even though when I went there it was already done. After that I dove into some old favourites to see how the monitor and new rig handled them and, honestly, it was like I was playing on a different kind of computer. Every game I threw at it that typically had horrendous tearing or stuttering ran like a dream without a hint of those graphical issues in any frame. It was definitely worth waiting as long as I did so that I could get a native G-Sync capable monitor.
One thing G-Sync does highlight however is slowdown that’s caused by other factors like a game engine trying to load files or performing some background task that impedes the rendering engine. These things, which would have previously gone unnoticed, are impossible to ignore now when everything else runs so smoothly. Thankfully most issues like that are few and far between as I’ve only noticed them shortly after loading into a level but it’s interesting to see issues like that bubbling up now, signalling that the next must-have upgrade might be drive related once again.
I will admit that some of these benefits come from the hugely increased refresh rate of my new monitors, jumping me from the paltry 60Hz all the way up to 144Hz. The difference is quite stark when you turn it on in Windows and, should you have the grunt to power it, astounding in games. After spending so long with content running in the 30~60Hz spectrum I had forgotten just how smooth higher frame rates are and whilst I don’t know if there’s much benefit going beyond 144Hz that initial bump up is most certainly worth it. Not a lot of other content (like videos, etc.) take advantage of the higher frame rates however, something I didn’t think would bother me until I started noticing it.
Suffice to say I’m enamored with G-Sync and consider the premium I paid for these TN panel monitors well worth it. I’m willing to admit that high frame rates and G-Sync isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re lusting after the better colour reproduction and high resolutions of IPS panels, but for someone like me who can’t help but notice tearing and stuttering it’s a dream come true. If you have the opportunity to see one in action I highly recommend it as it’s hard to describe just how much better it is until you see it for yourself.
