14 DAY TRIAL // Here's a bit of bad news: in a few years' time, you might not be able to swap from one graphics card provider to the other and still keep your monitor.
Well, you should be able to, but you won't be able to use the specific frame rate synching technologies interchangeably.
NVIDIA released G-Sync earlier this year, a hardware-based technology that syncs a monitor's refresh rate to the GPU.
It makes it unnecessary to enable V-Sync in games that suffer from screen tearing and other artifacts. V-Sync can eliminate some glitches and even bugs (in Windows 7, the controls don't work properly in Wizardry 8, for example) but murders response time. As in, causes horrible latency.
AMD has since developed Freesync, which is based on free standards technology from VESA.
Here is where the problem arises: NVIDIA has just revealed that it will focus on G-Sync and not support VESA's Adaptive Sync technology or derivatives. It didn't actually come out and say it, but it did express its intention to focus on G-Sync. Also, its new GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards don't support DisplayPort 1.2a (which is required foe VESA Adaptive Sync), only normal DisplayPort 1.2 connectors.
No word yet on whether this is a tactic deliberately meant to reduce the development prospects of Adaptive Sync.