NVIDIA To Officially Support VESA Adaptive Sync (FreeSync) Under “G-Sync Compatible”

[harlan4096]

The history of variable refresh gaming displays is longer than there is time available to write it up at CES. But in short, while NVIDIA has enjoyed a first-mover’s advantage with G-Sync when they launched it in 2013, the ecosystem of variable refresh monitors has grown rapidly in the last half-decade. The big reason for that is that the VESA, the standards body responsible for DisplayPort, added variable refresh as an optional part of the specification, creating a standardized and royalty-free means of enabling variable refresh displays. However to date, this VESA Adaptive Sync standard has only been supported on the video card side of matters by AMD, who advertises it under their FreeSync branding. Now however – and in many people’s eyes at last – NVIDIA is going to be jumping into the game and supporting VESA Adaptive Sync on GeForce cards, allowing gamers access to a much wider array of variable refresh monitors.

There are multiple facets here to NVIDIA’s efforts, so it’s probably best to start with the technology aspects and then relate that to NVIDIA’s new branding and testing initiatives. Though they don’t discuss it, NVIDIA has internally supported VESA Adaptive Sync for a couple of years now; rather than putting G-Sync modules in laptops, they’ve used what’s essentially a form of Adaptive Sync to enable “G-Sync” on laptops. As a result we’ve known for some time now that NVIDIA could support VESA Adaptive Sync if they wanted to, however until now they haven’t done this.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13797/nvi...e-branding