NVIDIA And MediaTek Team Up To Make G-SYNC Gaming Monitors Much More Affordable

These days, virtually every monitor—certainly every gaming monitor—supports at least some form of variable refresh rate technology. NVIDIA's G-SYNC was the pioneer, but AMD's FreeSync is far more ubiquitous largely due to its lower costs and less stringent requirements. Essentially, FreeSync simply requires a monitor to support VESA's Adaptive Sync technology, while G-SYNC requires a whole dedicated processor in the display.

That's changing soon, at least for a few new upcoming displays. NVIDIA put up a blog post announcing that it has partnered with MediaTek to create new display scaler chips that integrate "the full suite of NVIDIA G-SYNC technologies". This means no more G-SYNC module, which hopefully, means cheaper G-SYNC displays.


Why should you care when FreeSync displays are already so affordable? G-SYNC offers a lot of benefits over your typical FreeSync display. The most obvious is that NVIDIA's technology will sync all the way down to 1 Hz, while FreeSync typically taps out around 40-48 Hz, meaning that if you go below this frame rate, the monitor has to engage "Low Framerate Compensation", which can introduce additional frame pacing issues.

However, by far the most important G-SYNC feature is Variable Overdrive. Without getting too far into the weeds, LCD panels require a technology called "overdrive" to achieve rapid response times. The voltage impulse for overdrive has to be carefully calibrated to match the display's refresh rate; otherwise, you'll get nasty ringing artifacts called voltage overshoot. Variable Overdrive does what it sounds like: it adjusts the overdrive impulse to match the refresh rate dynamically, on the fly. There are some FreeSync displays that can do this, but most of them are as expensive as G-SYNC monitors.


Arguably the most exciting new feature coming with these displays is instead the long-awaited G-SYNC Pulsar. G-SYNC Pulsar combines display strobing for improved motion clarity with variable refresh rate presentation. Both LCDs and OLEDs, as sample-and-hold displays, inherently suffer from visual motion blur, and CRT-like strobing is necessary to mitigate this. G-SYNC Pulsar still has its limitations, but it is pretty much the holy grail of gaming display technology, at last for fast-paced action games.

That said, the first three displays set to launch—despite hopes for more-affordable G-SYNC monitors—are not going to be budget-friendly by any means. The ASUS ROG Swift 360Hz PG27AQNR, Acer Predator XB273U F5 and AOC AGON PRO AG276QSG2 are all said to have similar specifications, including 2560×1440 resolution, a blistering 360-Hz refresh rate, and HDR support of some kind. Combining that high-end visual feature set with G-SYNC makes for a tantalizing prospect and we're sure these monitors won't come cheap.