I recently reinstalled windows on my pc, and looked at pcmr on reddit to find a post of someone complaining about gsync, on nvidia systems, not beeing enabled by default everywhere.
That reminded me the pain it is to help someone enable it, with an ugly and hard to understand (for noobs) nvidia tutorial, and even worse with a freesync display.
On my system, with an amd card, and a freesync premium display, once the drivers were installed, freesync was enabled and no issues, nothing do fiddle with, it was just enabled automatically for all the system and windows to use.
Wonder why nvidia can’t do that.
It even set automatically my display to 165hz (tho maybe that could have been because it already was at 165 before the reinstall?).
There is still the trick to lower the max fps 3/4fps lower than the max hz of the display to teach, for better smoothness. But that is just an easy to do trick.
I switched from Nvidia to AMD about a year ago. I was worried because everyone harps on AMD drivers, but they’re pretty solid imo. I have yet to have an issue with them, and I’d say that I even prefer them at this point!
Things were hairy around the first Navi release (5XXX series), but they’ve really improved reliability and resilience since then.
The first time I connected a Gsync display to my RTX card, windows popped up a notification from Nvidia control panel saying, “Gsync compatible display detected, click here to configure”, and when I clicked it, it opened the control panel and the options were already on and set correctly for 240hz.
I just checked, it’s 5 (or 6 if it’s not your main display) clicks to enable gsync, nothing hard.
- Click on “show hidden icons” (bottom right thingy in the taskbar to roll out list with NV control panel, idk how it is called)
- Click on Nvidia control panel
- Click on setup gsync from the left list from display group (another click to select the correct screen possibly)
- Click on enable gsync at the top
- Click apply and you are done. Compared to setting up lightboost on screens that officially only support it in 3D this is simple.
For tech illiterate people, the difficulty of a task is not measured by the number of clicks it takes. Literally the first step you listed is enough to lose most people on their first PC.
Tech illiterate people are screwed either way because windows will leave their high refresh rate screens at 60Hz (unless something has changed).
But why not just enable it by default? The PC knows it’s a GSync Panel. It would be so easy. And kinda ironic as Nvidia was specifically advertising with the deep panel-Pc integration of their modules.
I have no clue. If it were up to me I’d enable it by default or have some dialog popup after you first connect a new gsync capable screen where you could set it up.
I didn’t have any trouble with it, either. It might have also been set up by default, but that was long ago, so can’t recall clearly.
What is “freesync”?
It’s amd’s side of Nvidia’s gsync, but with a different way of working.
Both do about the same thing : match the monitor hz to the fps, in a range of minimum and maximum hz.
So if your game is doing 103fps and monitor can do 40-144hz. The monitor will match 103hz.
It reduces tearing and can maybe reduce the perception of lag. It doesn’t remove it. If you have frame drops you will still see them.
For the ur way of working :
-Gsync uses a physical chip in the monitor to do what it has to do. In addition of beeing a paid technology, it adds to the cost, and nvidia also does a quality control check on the monitors, which also increases costs. Gsync can only be used with nvidia gpus.
- Freesync on the other hand is free (no royalties). Not sure if amd does a quality control or spec control, but they introduced some years ago freesync ranks. Where to get a higher rank of freesync the monitor has to larch or do better than some specs (https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/introducing-amd-freesync-premium-and-amd-freesync-premium-pro/ba-p/414261). It can be used on nvidia (still called gsync in the driver) or amd gpus.
There are some limitations with these tho, they can only be used with display port 1.4+(or 1.2+, i don’t remember) or hdmi 2.1+ because of variable refresh rate support. Except for amd gpus and freesync. Amd gpus support freesync with older hdmi versions.
Wow thanks for the explanation! I’d heard something about variable refresh rates but I don’t think my monitors support it and I never looked into it
Last I heard you had to pass some sort of quality control to be allowed to put the AMD Freesync logo on something. You don’t need to pass the testing to do Freesync, you just need it to be able to use the logo.
Amd and nvidia both claim to check that displays support the required features to apply the logo.
However as Monitor Unboxed (Hardware Unboxed second channel) said, there is plenty of trash monitors, freesync or gsync.
