14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has been trying for a long time to make their G-SYNC technology a standard, or at least to convince the gaming community to use monitors with G-SYNC support. CES 2019 debuted in force for Nvidia with an announcement that some monitors that have FreeSync support will also be deemed worthy to use G-SYNC as well.
As it often happens with standards, the race towards variable refresh rate had two contenders. One is called G-SYNC, from Nvidia, and the other one is FreeSync from AMD. Both need proprietary hardware in monitors, but there is one significant difference. AMD decided to make FreeSync royalty-free, and you can only guess which one was more popular.
The market is flooded by FreeSync monitors, while G-Sync monitors are way scarcer and a lot more expensive. Now, Nvidia is sort of recognizing the dominant position of FreeSync and decided to provide support, through their drivers to a number of monitors that already have FreeSync implemented.
G-SYNC is not going away
For now, Nvidia says that it has tested over 400 monitors that are already on the market, and decide that 12 of them can sustain their high standards. And they are also promising that more testing is being done and the list is going to be expanded.
“Support for G-SYNC Compatible monitors will begin Jan. 15 with the launch of our first 2019 Game Ready driver. Already, 12 monitors have been validated as G-SYNC Compatible (from the 400 we have tested so far). We’ll continue to test monitors and update our support list. For gamers who have monitors that we have not yet tested, or that have failed validation, we’ll give you an option to manually enable VRR, too,” says Nvidia.
One might be tempted to think that Nvidia is ditching G-Sync, at it’s often the case when two companies are trying to impose a standard. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The company is stressing the fact that G-Sync monitors are still the best way to experience gaming, and the technology is also making its way onto 65-inch super-sized NVIDIA Big Format Gaming Displays.
While the drivers will provide automatic support for FreeSync-compatible monitors, users will be able to manually activate the function in the drivers for the monitors that don’t have this kind of support.
