Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed a couple of days ago you probably saw my video looking into freesync on nvidia gpus after Nvidia open up support in their latest drivers there was lots of good feedback to that video which is always nice but there were a couple of questions and comments that I thought worth addressing in a separate video so here I haven't responded to a small selection of comments and I guess well let's get straight into it so the first comment we have here is from mobius 2k and they said so flickering and other issues would just vies great I think this was one of the top uploaded comments and it is definitely worth discussing the flickering and other issues were wise in the sense that Nvidia portrayed these problems as major issues with the free sync monitor ecosystem when actually it's only a very small number of monitors that have these problems I don't think they explicitly said this but it was definitely presented in a way that suggested the problems were inherent to the adaptive sync ecosystem hence the need for invidious magic god-tier g-sync implementation and hence the need for decent compatible certification and that's what I didn't like because there are plenty free sync monitors that work fine and adjust as grooves jisuk monitors really but it's also important to note that there are some monitors out there that genuinely do have flickering and blanking issues with adaptive sync and able there aren't many monitors but some early models in particular did have issues I don't think these crappy defective products are indicative of the overall free sync ecosystem and certainly anyone that has a monitor that experiences these issues should return it as defective it's also kind of funny to me because there are some g-sync monitors that have flickering issues in some circumstances the Acer predator X 34 for example is technically a 60 Hertz monitor that can be overclocked to 100 Hertz and there were some reports around launch that some models exhibited flickering when overclocked to 100 Hertz again this was a problem with some models of that monitor it had really nothing to do with J sync so another comment here of course it would only work with Pascal cheering since they are the only ones they sell luckily for the surplus of Pascal stock otherwise I'm sure they would advertise this as a cheering feature yeah wouldn't surprise me if in video we're restricting freesync to pass countering for marketing reasons but the real reason is that Pascal cards were the first to support DisplayPort 1.2 a Maxwell also technically supports adaptive sync without a g-sync module and does so in laptops but desktop maxwell cards don't have DisplayPort 1.2 a which is a requirement for adaptive sync hence why Pascal and up are the only cards that officially support it so Peter here has asked this question Tim did you consider that free sync monitors could get more expensive because in video might charge a license fee for each sold free sync monitor which Nvidia approves it wouldn't be the first time that Nvidia does a scam like this they did so for SLI they made every motherboard company pay a license fee for sli per sold motherboard which the customer who bought the motherboard had to pay so it might be bad for AMD customers that Nvidia now allows freezing to be used depending on whether or not nvidia charges for a license again yeah this is something I've seen discussed a fair bit and I think it's hard to say for certain what will happen so so far I haven't spotted any price increases for the 12 Jason compatible models but I doubt there would be an increase to the price anyway because most stock would have been already sold to retails at the old price so I guess the question is primarily where the new free sync monitors will cost more so I sort of look at this from two angles the first one is that a monitor doesn't need to be Jason compatible to work with NVIDIA GPUs with this comments motherboard example a manufacturer did have to pay nvidia to enable SLI support so they either pay to have that feature or they don't pay and the feature isn't supported but with the monitors adaptive sync will support NVIDIA GPUs or now work with NVIDIA GPUs whether the OEM pays for juicing compatible certification or not so there's not as much I guess of an incentive to pay so I'd expect that companies introduced I guess in producing budget or value products will not bother with the Jason compatible branding and just continue to offer those products with no price increases the other angle is marketing some companies may wish to include g-sync compatible browsing so they can market their monitor as being Jason compatible I expect there would be a fee involved but I can't imagine the fee would be high enough to change pricing significantly after all if the fee was high enough that either the OEMs margins were reduced by a decent amount or the pricing becomes uncompetitive I doubt the OEM with would bother with the sticker especially because as I just mentioned it's not necessary tips get decent compatible certification to make the monitor work with NVIDIA GPUs it's also not unusual for monitor OMS to pay for certain stickers and branding on their boxes I'm not 100% sure but I believe if OMS want to use either free sync or the phaser display HDR branding there are small associated fees with that and I'd be surprised of juice incompatible was any different it'll be interesting to see how this plays out though but my expectation is that monitor pricing will be largely unaffected even if there is a license fee associated with the gcn comparable branding so expect that license fee would be certainly much much smaller than the cost of buying the modules that we've seen across you know the fully fledged g-sync monitors Richard O'Shea has said makes you wonder where the pressure to support free sync came from I guess it came from the market so much for walled gardens um yeah I think I think the writing has been on the wall for some time now the free sync monitor ecosystem is far larger than Jason can has grown a huge rate so I think it's just got to the point where Nvidia restricting buyers to just g-sync monitors was working against them previously there were benefits I guess to keeping Nvidia owners locked into the war garden but it's now gone to the point where NVIDIA GPU owners were stuck with just maybe 10% of the adaptive sink market while AMD GPU owners could access the other 90% in the budget market I think this hurts a fair bit you could pare say at $200 RX 580 was the 200 or freesync monitor and get a good experience but in video owners will be left spending 100 to 200 dollars more to get the same adaptive sync experience and that's a lot of money for a budget gamer so locking it down I don't think was a sustainable approach then there as well was the threat of Intel GPUs around the corner until a supporting freesync starting with Gen 11 integrated graphics and presumably their discreet GPS will support it as well so in just a few years in video would be battling both AMD and Intel in the adaptive sync market and that's not a winning strategy so really they had no choice but to enable free sync support so you had one commenter here like to the fact that only Windows 10 is supported with the NVIDIA freesync they are no support for iOS is including early versions of Windows and yep I've seen this is the case I don't think there would be any technical reason why freesync wouldn't work on old operating systems so I guess it's a bit disappointing that's locked down but at the same time a lot of other gaming features are also restricted to Windows 10 like DirectX 12 so really if you're a gamer you probably should be running Windows 10 anyway we had another question here from Allan does DP to HDMI adapter work pretty simple answer to this one no it doesn't work I tested it and many other have as well and confirm that this isn't possible so unfortunately all those through sink HDMI motors simply don't work even with an adapter one comment here says I have had an AOC 1440p 165 Hertz g-sync monitor for about eight months and it has started blanking lately not sure what to do about it um yeah as I've mentioned a few times any blanking issues directly related to the monitor itself not free sink adaptive sink or G sink so if it's looking like your IFC model has become defective I'd recommend aromanian and luckily because it happened within eight months it should still be under warranty so assent here host 'add a long comment i'm only gonna take one excerpt of it and respond to it so I'll just read it out here you seem to think free sync and gsync vrrr equals that one is as good as the other while theoretically Trudeau's not sure in practice the VR our range for free sync monitors is all over the place sometimes the free sync VR our range is so small it's almost useless g-sync Auto op is the exact same and very wide v RR range there's also the matter of input lag where real g-sync monitors are consistently the fastest free synchronous can be anywhere from great to terrible this must always be front and center when discussing free sync chasing in abstract unless the customer is willing to look through very detailed reviews which measure V are arranged and input lag which don't exist for every monitor you can't say both VR our technologies are equivalent in practice g-sync is often better and never worse unfortunately so yeah this is something that has come up in a number of comments and a number of articles discussions all that sort of thing but in my opinion when discussing precinct were suggesting I think it's important to split up the technology with talk of the validation and branding in terms of the technology there's very little difference between freesync and cheese both allow a monitor to various refresh rate in sync with the output rate of the GPU both allow for features like low framerate compensation there are some minor differences precinct for example supports Apple over HDMI and juicing supports variable overdrive but the key aspects of the technology are basically functionally identical and as an aside I don't agree that juicing motors are consistently the fastest in terms of input lag personally the fastest monitors I've tested have been Precinct lawyers anyway where the differences come in is simply in what each company allows to be branded as either freezing or g-sync in other words what passes the validation process g-sync validation is significantly stricter than freezing it requires support for things like LFC it requires wide refresh ranges good input lag no technical issues and so on G tink is more a brand that tells you overall whether the display is delivering a good experience freesync branding on the other hand isn't really concerned with monitor quality it's simply an indicator to let buyers know that the panel supports adaptive sync if it supports adaptive sync it passes through sync validation now I don't necessarily think either approach is right or wrong the g-sync badge is guaranteeing a certain level of quality however that comes at a significant price and there's no technical reason why a free sync monitor can't match a g-sync monitor in terms of functionality and validation it's just that with a free sync monitor producing a quality display is up to the monitor manufacturers while with g-sync it's a requirement to get certified the end result is for equivalent displays freesync motors can deliver an identical experience to gsync if the monitor REM wants to and at a lower cost however the trade-off these entry-level monitors will have free sync browning and won't be very good I also don't think that having crappy entry-level free sync miners with narrow refresh ranges is a bad thing these are monitors that previously wouldn't have supported adaptive sync at all and certainly wouldn't pass through sync validation so including free sync is a value addition at little cost sure I guess the experience might not be great but for entry-level monitors we're talking about what we're not talking about the difference between free sync and gsync we're talking about the difference between freesync and no adaptive singing and personally I choose to have adaptive sync every time no matter the Refresh range so I think most buyers should look at G sync versus free sync in this way G sync well it's kind of I guess a sticker that certifies an experience if you can't be bothered doing any research into what monitors are good and don't want to read reviews and that sort of thing you can buy jisuk monitor knowing that generally you'll be getting a decent product but you'll pay for that privilege I guess it's similar to buying say a pre-built system from a vendor like ibuypower they're certifying everything works with your new PC but you'll pay more than researching and building it yourself whereas free sync that's just a sticker that tells you a monitor has adaptive sync it's not certifying an experience it's merely telling you that a certain feature is supported some free sync monos being crappy isn't a failing of the brand for not having tight validation processes because it was never really the point of precinct and is it the intention of the sticker like I guess the HDMI sticker tells you the monitor supports HDMI the free sync sticker tells you the monitor supports adaptive sync and you'll need to research which monitors are actually worth buying yourself any other final comment I wanted to address you is from Amer they say a monitor also automatically fails in videos testing if freesync isn't enabled by default in the monitors settings and yeah that's an interesting thing to bring up I suspect a huge number of free sync monitors have failed validation for failing two things not supporting low framerate compensation and not having free sync enabled by default at a guess I'd say at least half of all free sync monitors if not more don't support AFC and then another chunk of monitors that do support LFC ship with precinct disabled by default of course in both cases the monitor the main support adaptive sync just fine but I guess with those rules you can see how out of 400 monitors tested so many of them would fail yeah so I guess that pretty much is it for this video hopefully this is addressed a few outstanding questions and concerns with free sync on NVIDIA GPUs I'm definitely glad to hear that most people have managed to get their free sync display working with no issues I think we all expected that to be the case but it's good to get confirmation from you guys in the comments as always you can subscribe for more display testing consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our monthly live stream an exclusive discord chat I'll catch you in the next one