Nvidia G-Sync Compatible Monitors: Understanding the New Validation Process

As many gamers know, Nvidia's G-Sync technology is designed to provide a smoother gaming experience by synchronizing the refresh rate of a monitor with the frame rate of a graphics card. Recently, Nvidia announced that it has implemented a new validation process for monitors that are compatible with its G-Sync technology. This new process ensures that only the most reliable and high-quality monitors can display adaptive sync, which is essential for providing a seamless gaming experience.

The first part of the validation process involves checking if the monitor is not compatible with Nvidia's G-Sync module. This means that even if you already own a monitor that is not designed to work with the physical G-Sync module on your graphics card, it can still be used with adaptive sync as long as it passes the new G-Sync compatible validation process. However, this does not mean that you should go out and buy a monitor specifically designed for G-Sync if you don't already have one.

The other part of the validation process involves checking the visual qualities of the monitors. The display panel must be free from flicker, brightness variations, and other visual artifacts that can affect the gaming experience. To check this, Nvidia has created a list of compatible monitors on its website, which allows gamers to select their preferred monitor without worrying about compatibility issues.

Another important aspect of the G-Sync compatible validation process is the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) range or ratio. The ideal range for VRR in G-Sync compatible monitors is between 2.4 and 2.5, where this means that if the minimum refresh rate or framerate is divided by the maximum, the result should be within this range. This ensures that the monitor can maintain a smooth display even at high frame rates, which is essential for providing an immersive gaming experience.

For example, let's say you're playing a game with a refresh rate of 60 Hz and a framerate of 40 Hz. If you divide the maximum refresh rate by the minimum framerate, you should get a ratio between 1.5 and 2.5 to stay within the G-Sync compatible range. This allows the monitor to adapt to changing frame rates without introducing any tearing or stuttering.

One notable example that was shown during the presentation is AMD's Radeon FreeSync technology, which has some differences in testing beyond what Nvidia offers with G-Sync. While both technologies aim to provide a smooth gaming experience, their testing and validation processes are not identical.

In conclusion, Nvidia's new G-Sync compatible validation process ensures that only high-quality monitors can display adaptive sync, providing a seamless gaming experience for gamers. Understanding the VRR range ratio is crucial for this, as it allows the monitor to adapt to changing frame rates without any issues. By following the guidelines set by Nvidia and checking their list of compatible monitors, gamers can ensure that they are getting the best possible gaming performance from their hardware.

The G-Sync Ultimate branding is another notable aspect of the validation process. This branding indicates that the monitor supports HDR, DisplayPort 1.4 A, and has matrix-matrix backlights with hundreds of zones. These features provide a high level of image quality and are essential for providing an immersive gaming experience.

In conclusion to this article, we hope that it has provided you with a better understanding of what G-Sync compatible means and how it is different from other technologies like FreeSync. We also hope that you have gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of VRR range ratio in ensuring a smooth gaming experience. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to post them below, and we will do our best to address them.

For those who are interested in learning more about G-Sync technology and how it can be used with their graphics cards, we recommend checking out Nvidia's website for more information. Additionally, we would like to thank the community for their support and feedback, which has been invaluable in helping us understand and improve our content. If you would like to help us continue to create high-quality content for gamers, please consider supporting us on Patreon or by purchasing gear from one of our recommended retailers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneveryone saw at the Nvidia suite now at CES 2019 the first thing we're looking at here is going to be the monitor side of things this is one of the biggest news items at the Jensen discussion a couple of days ago and something we've talked about briefly but Nvidia is now supporting adaptive sync with non g-sync as in the module displays so the name for this is going to be G sync compatible and they're also non compatible or non validated monitors which would be your traditional free sync branded or just adaptive sync monitors as opposed to something with a an FPGA in it like a G sync FPGA before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte Zee 390 a RS master motherboard which comes equipped with one of the more powerful Z 390 VRMs for heavier overclocks on the new 9th Gen Intel CPUs the ARS master is also one of the few motherboards with a real heatsink this generation featuring a mix of high surface area fins and looks oriented hover blocks oh and it's also got updated RDV illumination learn more at the link below so it's let's we're gonna walk through some of the common questions that we've seen in comment sections online hopefully answer some of those today if you have more posting below we'll follow up but I think the the first thing we need to go through here is clarifying some of the branding and naming so adaptive sync is the technology kind of like you have SMT versus hyperthreading hyperthre Tina's SMT it's a subclass of the same thing so adaptive sync is the parent technology we've talked about this for years now at this point free sync is an AMD branded version of this and gsync is an NVIDIA physical module that's existed for a while now in panels that that you all are likely familiar with Jesus incompatible means that it's an adaptive sync monitor could be a free sync monitor that has been validated in Nvidia's labs as producing a good experience which is partly qualitative and partly quantitative so some of the tests that Nvidia goes through for a decent compatible display would be things like visual quality so can you see any color issues or brightness variation or in this one over here we have some footage of it flickery and occasionally those would be things that obviously don't pass the gcn compatible test and then the ones that are non validated this is important point that many of you have asked about can still be used so even if it's not validated you can still enable adaptive sync you can still use it with your Nvidia card Torian or Pascal are the ones that are made immediately as supported anyway it's just a matter of will you see issues and part of that's going to be down to your hardware part will be down to you for example this monitor immediately to my right has some slight flicker some some brightness variation I suppose for me this would be fine but for other people probably not so you can still use it with adaptive sync to answer that question that's been in the comment sections it's just if you already own the monitor you can try it but probably don't go out and buy it monitor if you don't have one yet that's not juicing compatible if you plan to use the feature so a lot of work to be done here but so that's spar twelve have passed Nvidia has a list on the website of the monitors that have passed for g-sync compatible if you would like to use a monitor with adaptive sync but not a g-sync module with your taurine or your Pascal video card there's another thing here so a vrr range or ratio of the VR arrange is important for this in order to pass g-sync compatible validation the range that Nvidia is looking for is 2.4 and that's just a cheeves by dividing so you divide the maximum refresh range or the framerate by the minimum and the result should be or the quotient should be 2.4 the reason for that is I guess if you kind of will take some numbers that are easy to work with you have a refresh range of say 40 to 60 and you have a framerate drop below 40 so you're below your minimum adaptive sync range you hit maybe 35 or 38 or something like that you have 35 you're out of range in order to stay within range you could double so if you have let's say traditionally 60 to 120 or something you drop down to 50 or 55 you can double your at 100 or 110 that's within the range and so you're not going to drop out of adaptive sync in this scenario you'll get a repeated frame or you could have multiple repeated frames depending on the maximum range which would potentially be perceived as a stutter but that's better than a tear depend on who you are so going back to the other example they were hitting 35 eww get to 70 out of 60 so you drop out of adaptive sync and you're now going to default to either vsync on or off depending on the settings of the game the control panel or whatever you're using so the theoretical range for that you'd want a ratio of 2.0 it's a kind of be a minimum and videos at 2.4 for their ratio just to have some margin to make sure that the experience is is more or less guaranteed as good instead of existing right on the edge of it Andy as an example and we're gonna check their website and put it on the screen if we can find it our understanding is that Andy has a requirement of a 2.5 for their ratio of some of their validation so it's AMD and NVIDIA are more or less in agreement there although the testing beyond that differs and and that's why you see some of the issues appear in free sync monitors that we've discussed in the past so that covers the vrr range visual qualities looked at luminance variations looked at all of these monitors here today our factory reset except with the instances where factory reset turns off adaptive sync where it's been enabled so shouldn't be any anything there if you're going to be a cynic or skeptical about the settings and I think that that covers a lot of this there is another branding name I should point out which is G sync ultimate so G sync ultimate if you see that what it means is HDR is supported DisplayPort 1.4 a is supported 1000 nits for all of those displays and then there are matrix-matrix back lights with hundreds of zones something we showed probably last year as well if you're curious about what all that means so hopefully that answers at least some of the basic questions of what g-sync compatible means how it's different from free sync how it's different from the physical g-sync module if you have further questions please post them below and upload each other for the good ones and not the memes ideally so that I can pass them along easily thank you for watching subscribe for more always get a store that gamers accessed on that I was it helped us out directly or patreon.com slash gamers Nexus I'll see you all next timeeveryone saw at the Nvidia suite now at CES 2019 the first thing we're looking at here is going to be the monitor side of things this is one of the biggest news items at the Jensen discussion a couple of days ago and something we've talked about briefly but Nvidia is now supporting adaptive sync with non g-sync as in the module displays so the name for this is going to be G sync compatible and they're also non compatible or non validated monitors which would be your traditional free sync branded or just adaptive sync monitors as opposed to something with a an FPGA in it like a G sync FPGA before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte Zee 390 a RS master motherboard which comes equipped with one of the more powerful Z 390 VRMs for heavier overclocks on the new 9th Gen Intel CPUs the ARS master is also one of the few motherboards with a real heatsink this generation featuring a mix of high surface area fins and looks oriented hover blocks oh and it's also got updated RDV illumination learn more at the link below so it's let's we're gonna walk through some of the common questions that we've seen in comment sections online hopefully answer some of those today if you have more posting below we'll follow up but I think the the first thing we need to go through here is clarifying some of the branding and naming so adaptive sync is the technology kind of like you have SMT versus hyperthreading hyperthre Tina's SMT it's a subclass of the same thing so adaptive sync is the parent technology we've talked about this for years now at this point free sync is an AMD branded version of this and gsync is an NVIDIA physical module that's existed for a while now in panels that that you all are likely familiar with Jesus incompatible means that it's an adaptive sync monitor could be a free sync monitor that has been validated in Nvidia's labs as producing a good experience which is partly qualitative and partly quantitative so some of the tests that Nvidia goes through for a decent compatible display would be things like visual quality so can you see any color issues or brightness variation or in this one over here we have some footage of it flickery and occasionally those would be things that obviously don't pass the gcn compatible test and then the ones that are non validated this is important point that many of you have asked about can still be used so even if it's not validated you can still enable adaptive sync you can still use it with your Nvidia card Torian or Pascal are the ones that are made immediately as supported anyway it's just a matter of will you see issues and part of that's going to be down to your hardware part will be down to you for example this monitor immediately to my right has some slight flicker some some brightness variation I suppose for me this would be fine but for other people probably not so you can still use it with adaptive sync to answer that question that's been in the comment sections it's just if you already own the monitor you can try it but probably don't go out and buy it monitor if you don't have one yet that's not juicing compatible if you plan to use the feature so a lot of work to be done here but so that's spar twelve have passed Nvidia has a list on the website of the monitors that have passed for g-sync compatible if you would like to use a monitor with adaptive sync but not a g-sync module with your taurine or your Pascal video card there's another thing here so a vrr range or ratio of the VR arrange is important for this in order to pass g-sync compatible validation the range that Nvidia is looking for is 2.4 and that's just a cheeves by dividing so you divide the maximum refresh range or the framerate by the minimum and the result should be or the quotient should be 2.4 the reason for that is I guess if you kind of will take some numbers that are easy to work with you have a refresh range of say 40 to 60 and you have a framerate drop below 40 so you're below your minimum adaptive sync range you hit maybe 35 or 38 or something like that you have 35 you're out of range in order to stay within range you could double so if you have let's say traditionally 60 to 120 or something you drop down to 50 or 55 you can double your at 100 or 110 that's within the range and so you're not going to drop out of adaptive sync in this scenario you'll get a repeated frame or you could have multiple repeated frames depending on the maximum range which would potentially be perceived as a stutter but that's better than a tear depend on who you are so going back to the other example they were hitting 35 eww get to 70 out of 60 so you drop out of adaptive sync and you're now going to default to either vsync on or off depending on the settings of the game the control panel or whatever you're using so the theoretical range for that you'd want a ratio of 2.0 it's a kind of be a minimum and videos at 2.4 for their ratio just to have some margin to make sure that the experience is is more or less guaranteed as good instead of existing right on the edge of it Andy as an example and we're gonna check their website and put it on the screen if we can find it our understanding is that Andy has a requirement of a 2.5 for their ratio of some of their validation so it's AMD and NVIDIA are more or less in agreement there although the testing beyond that differs and and that's why you see some of the issues appear in free sync monitors that we've discussed in the past so that covers the vrr range visual qualities looked at luminance variations looked at all of these monitors here today our factory reset except with the instances where factory reset turns off adaptive sync where it's been enabled so shouldn't be any anything there if you're going to be a cynic or skeptical about the settings and I think that that covers a lot of this there is another branding name I should point out which is G sync ultimate so G sync ultimate if you see that what it means is HDR is supported DisplayPort 1.4 a is supported 1000 nits for all of those displays and then there are matrix-matrix back lights with hundreds of zones something we showed probably last year as well if you're curious about what all that means so hopefully that answers at least some of the basic questions of what g-sync compatible means how it's different from free sync how it's different from the physical g-sync module if you have further questions please post them below and upload each other for the good ones and not the memes ideally so that I can pass them along easily thank you for watching subscribe for more always get a store that gamers accessed on that I was it helped us out directly or patreon.com slash gamers Nexus I'll see you all next time\n"