Gadgetory

I am recording now please go alright so the core thing about g-sync that they're touting here is the ability that lets you get away from completely isochronous or fixed time slices for your games now time slices have been with us for the 50 years since television when you've got you had to refresh the screen in these continuous patterns because the light from the phosphor is just decayed it went away with backlit LCD displays the lights continuous there so there is no sensible reason why we have to be doing that and because we are we get these artifacts of either tear or judder so it's really good to get away from that now if you try for a high frame rate like 60 frames per second which but I've been a big proponent of if you miss it hurts really bad you you know you drop all the way down to 30 frames per second Wow with something like g-sync if you if you take 17 milliseconds instead of 16 milliseconds nobody can even tell it just comes out as a tiny delay on the frame and that's a wonderful thing so that's one real advantage if you're trying hard for a frame rate it makes your inevitable miss imperceptible if you're not even trying if you're just making a game that's randomly running it whatever the hell frame rate it turns out it magically works out on this if you're going between 20 and 80 frames per second like you know a lot of games will if they're unconstrained there this makes that beneficial it means that it's smooth at 20 but then at 80 it's silky and this is a really great thing now the interesting tension that we've got here is that I didn't really appreciate this a year ago but the persistence on a display the fact that it is continuously illuminated contributes to a lot of subtle blurring effects on the screen when you look at like a text you know like a webpage if you pan it across the screen smoothly or if you scroll like an iPad or something even if it's scrolling at a perfect 60 frames per second smoothness it's hard to read because it feels blurred in the direction that it's moving and that is a consequence of the persistence the fact that it's continuously illuminated the solution to that is to only illuminate it very briefly now this happened automatically for CRT displays as the electron beam scanned over you only had you know microseconds of illumination from that before it went away and there's a category of people that would talk about like sports broadcasting where they'd complaint is never been the same you've got flat panels because everything is a little bit more smeared on the pans I never really noticed that so much but in a head mounted display it is night and day there's one of the more dramatic technology demos that you can do to have a display that you can switch between low persistence and full persistence it's a big deal now the interesting thing is in the last couple years Nvidia's had their light boost technology for the 3d my vision stuff and you could put that in you could use that as a low persistence monitor people wrote firmware hacks to be able to do this so if you made 120 Hertz game and doom 3 BFG was one of the few things that is it's an old game and we paid a little bit of attention you could run it at 120 frames per second locked and you could put into a mode like this and it was pretty awesome but no modern game runs at 120 frames per second a let alone stereo for a head-mounted display because right now people will just say I'm a thirty Hertz game and why bother and even if you try for 60 no that's enough some blood sweat and tears to get there pushing further beyond as hard but g-sync makes it a smooth continuum so every bit that you do to help helps you know it is better to be at 70 than to 6 and then 60 it's better to be at 40 than 30 this is a good thing and I think that this will be a path that can start bringing some games up now we've got the other tension of like 4k displays it's like okay let's go back down to 30 frames per second to do a 4k display but at least there's the option of possibly pushing up because once you get over 90 95 Hertz ideally up to 120 or 140 for some of these monitors will run at you can start doing this low persistent stuff but the problem with this and this is an interesting tension I if you do the low persistence and you bury your frame rate then it changes the intensity of what you're looking at so what needs to happen is you need to vary the length of the illumination based on how long the frame rate was now g-sync can do all of these things they actually they they didn't want us to really talk about this aspect of g-sync these I thought I would confuse the you know I the people listening but I actually think that's pretty important where it's got the low persistence option right now it's binary you can go to 120 Hertz and be low persistence or you can be at variable framerate but there's no reason why this can't be combined where you adapting one towards the other then you get this option where the best world the best case of this would be the game is running if it's running at 20 30 frames per second it's full persistence it's just variable but as the game creeps up and it gets over 90 frames per second then it can start adapting the backlight to it and that'd be great so you might have a game where only in some simple scenes are you at low persistence wonderfulness while in your massive outdoor exploding everything then it's falling down as for persistence but that would be great it's making things better where they can be better and there's a lot of other uses for this type of thing like I had mentioned Android specifically because I did complain that you take the like the Nvidia shield where it's got should have plenty of horsepower but if you play sonic on it it drops frames every now and then and that's not the fault of the GPU or the CPU it's the fault largely of the power management and what happens on Android where they're they're constantly trying to save power by adapting the core count and the frequencies on these things and unfortunately what happens is they often pull the power down until you start dropping frames which is exactly the wrong thing to do so we can fight that by saying well we want a dedicated amount of core cores and frequency but then you waste power where really the optimal thing would be let them manage the power as they do now and use variable refresh technology to just mean when you slightly miss it it will be imperceptible if you go to 17 milliseconds for your frame instead of 15 there and that will be a great thing but even invidious knows that even though they own that platform it's gonna be integrating with another display vendor pushing things through integrating with more Android stack these are hard cross company issues and NVIDIA it's great that Nvidia did this I've been harping on this for a number of years but it took something a company like Nvidia that can change GPUs and that can change the hardware that can write the drivers for it that can you know leverage the display vendors to actually put something like this in it could have happened five years ago it would have been good to happen five years ago but you know it's finally happening now thank you very much everyone appreciated you taking the time I would offer demanded thank you okay all right we're gonna go try to intercept in Sweeney hey Tim can I borrow you for just a couple minutes just to basically say hi to the viewers sure okay I am going to have to okay this is very challenging okay but can you kind of reach past me here and do you see channel one where it's there's an anim yep can you switch that to a and then same with channel two so there you guys have it Tim Sweeney that's my camera so we've got about 3,000 viewers on here right now that are that are watching live so you know what I guess probably the most appropriate thing given that we're at in videos event is can you talk a little bit about do you think and how important you think it is oh sure um is really important piece of technology it enables a games running any framerate to have the smoothness that you get from running at a constant framerate you know right now to achieve 60 frames a second perfect smoothest if to make great sacrifices in a game and if you just go one frame below it to 59 and suddenly your game's interrupted by these massive starters and the g-sync tech really creates a continuum so that whatever level of frames the agam is outputting can be displayed smoothly and without these crazy art effects that you have in games nowadays it means a gamers game developers a we would have create really awesome levels of content and still achieve the sort of smoothness that you get in games like Call of Duty for example I mean one of the things that the average person I think really doesn't understand is build they're quick to blame any kind of a framerate issue on well the game optimization isn't very good can you talk a little bit about the ballot the delicate balancing act that you guys go through to deliver both great level of detail and a smooth gaming experience sure it's a constant trade-off for a game developer you know what Gears of War for example we aimed at creating the most impressive visual experience we could while trying to hit 30 frames a second pretty consistently but you know once in a while there's a moment when the game drops below that and it really impacts the quality because you're not dropping to 29 or 28 frames a second you're jittering back and forth between 20 and 30 and it's just a it's just really bad this type makes it much easier to all games that have a high level of smoothness and that's going to mean a lot more games will be smooth in the future it's it's one of those kind of magical technologies that you don't necessarily look at the screen and recognize exactly what's going wrong it just looks wrong and it looks jittery and unrealistic for reasons that are hard to identify when you see it working perfectly it's an entirely different experience so in your mind would we see something akin to gsync on handhelds televisions along with PC monitors and how far out do you see that in the future I mean how much would you love to have this on the console we'd love to have this everywhere televisions projectors mobile LCD displays it's going to be especially important for you know products like oculus where you want to have a very high inconsistent frame rate for fast response time this technology it's starting at like almost everything it's an innovation in the industry it's starting on high-end PC and it will work its way throughout the rest of the industry over the coming years all right well I don't want to take up too much of your time I know that you're supposed to be up here for the panel but I appreciate you just taking the time to say hi to the viewers and I would shake your hand but if nothing else I'm gonna try and have like a photo-op sort of that's the best we were able to do thank you so much for taking the time yes so there you guys go have you forgiven the enforcer now the Foresters not bad good because he helped us sync up with Tim Sweeney so there you go Tim over there actually he wandered away from us over to the G sync demo you can see he's got his face about four inches from the screen okay maybe we're not gonna leave him alone just yet okay just for fun we're gonna bother you again here you're playing around with the demo right now correct yes yes this has three modes of vsync novi sync and gsync of course in a video of this you are not going to see any of what I'm talking about but the difference in smoothness is really impressive with visa you see you don't see tearing artifacts but you do see an inconsistency with the framerate consistently you know jittering back and forth between one frame rate and another because of the way that frame rates are discretized I never knew what was wrong vsync always felt off to me I never liked it well it's subtle so you turn off vsync and you have a different set of errors which is that each scanline is independently experiencing its own discretization but now you're getting this tearing where half of the screen is the previous frame and half of the freeness in the next frame wherever arbitrarily in time the change and then what you think it's displaying frames at a consistent rate and so you get a lack of jittering artifacts and look here the frame rate is varying here in places it's dropping probably even below definitely around 30 frames a second but this smooth dropping from 60 down to 30 as much much less disturbing than dropping frames one at a time and what you're looking at right now looks like a very extreme example it looks like the first it looks like the first thing Tim did when he got here was cranked the frame time minimums all the way down and the maximums all the way up or was it already like that when you got here okay really the worst case so when the debt so the way the demos running here let me show you this guy so it's mayhem in a multiplayer game where they're enormous numbers of players is causing crazy spikes and frame pile all the time but here what do you think you won't appreciate it in this video because it's a video of a screen with a different display resolution and sampling rate but it's just uh it is polished to the point where there's this old text on the spinning pendulum and you can actually read it which is astonishing because if you go turn off vsync and then it's tearing it makes it hard it's distracting your eye away from it it's a it's making a really big qualitative difference very cool okay thank you we really will we really will stop bothering you now thank you so guys I mean you would never really see okay so the way the demo set up for minimum and maximum frame times so it's it's kind of swinging between 60 and 30 and that really does present a very worst-case scenario I mean that's kind of like an artificial situation where you're looking down at something intensive like a scene with a bunch of stuff exploding and then swinging your your camera up to the ceiling and then back down and then back up and then back down and back up and you trying to make the experience disconcerting and that's the worst case scenario that we're kind of looking at over there and even then it's pretty darn smooth someone says g-sync will somehow adoption will affect it doesn't g-sync will affect the people who buy the gear that runs it there there's no you don't have to wait for any industry adoption other than making sure that there are monitors that have the technology built into them which nvidia is saying will be available as as early as q1 next year so it'll be up to the individual to adopt it and enjoy it and that's that it'll work on any game it'll work on any Kepler based GPU and it will work on any g-sync enabled monitor and you don't have to wait for game developers to enable anything you don't have to wait for any else anything else to happen g-sync we're going to a very small initial user base because it's based on a popular TV you and a particular monitor that as a particular partnership minute hello crystal ball again so is this within the next five years we will be able to actually forget about a target for a great of the game and assume that the end user can experience it really reducing in delivery this is gonna be pretty addictive because this is not like it doubles the size that died of something to do this it's not that expensive technology there like he went into these licensing cost and what are going to be on here but I this is something that should be broadly tossed like guys like from a pure technology standpoint this is just the right thing and I obviously in early years this is just gonna be smooth this benefit birth for people but in the space of five years or something I would hope something like this is pretty much absolutely you also there's a limited amount of things they monitor manufacturer human factor connection can be done once you have the only things in yeah suddenly this is actually a good baby please remove the the sharpening that detection and the motion compensation and actually add this and forty pixels would be nice also and I think it will be when people actually see the planes it's been doing and more of your people see nuts will actually be a lot of product movement in the world industry to transitions or something like this really by quick and that's been a hopefully because that actually doesn't say the target games more specific important stuff yeah Kentucky the rest of the industry needs to hardware up every display device every platform including mobile platforms we need to adopt this kind of technology over the next few years because it's it's visually striking doesn't show up in a TV commercial but it's to the new player playing game it's incredibly apparent the difference in visual quality here and so it's going to be a major initiative for everybody or else people are gonna look at and take over that looks like you know the last generation actually well one which I have there is that when going to these bodies retail stores when they sell tons of Tulsa to displace or monitors that you see all of them standing there really nice monitors really nice big screen TVs look amazing and all them are set and actually gave a start-up showroom move mode that just cranks out all of the colors I would like to replace that removed that note the showroom mode is that it does not exist in more instead of us have this greater than you actually see the difference on that the false colors you don't want to have that anyway that's not calibrated to anything that we actually create it just creates a new artificial environment plus all the dollars we'll sit back absolutely logistics wise just a second in terms I've got to go catch a flight I didn't want to I didn't want to take off without thanking you guys properly you guys you guys not only make make the show make the launch you guys to be made out here I mean this is a quite a privilege to have you guys anywhere but have the three of you guys in the same place at the same time and having this kind of access to you guys it is really really a privilege it's a privilege for me another push for everybody in the audience it's just so much fun to listen to you guys I want to thank you guys for everything you've done for the game industry but not just a game industry for the computer industry the technology industry and just good old-fashioned people needs in general ok I think you guys are fantastic I love you guys love your friendship they certainly or K versus g-sync what is more important today the disagree yeah I mean at this point look at we will all be able to suck up to the resolution but right now people migrate to 4k and they get much lower frame rates on the experiences I think the trade-offs already hit a little bit south of optimal but people are making pallet so my point is do you think you don't want to go back to anything else well I got the whole issue about the the low persistence smooth displays that I have to deal with them out of it i displace systems high but I think that for a conventional desktop monitor I really want to see this just absolutely the good news is it doesn't have to be or there if those were team honors that there are not g-sync because you see them shuttering and tearing and exactly the problems we've been talking about now it's actually an object lesson there is a she 4k is kind of a workstation application for the next few years right in that timeframe we'll be using these liners for building games because we all have a huge set of complex tools and photographers will be using for their work videographers lots of people will be isn't but I don't think it's the right output resolution for rendering until your TV is significantly faster consumer knows like what said 28th tariff boxes in a single GPU depositing 300 bucks that's what you want to go 4k and is when you need to stay in 30s and 60 to 90 frames per second and then actually just to pull up without the department's forever just essentially happen well because it's for the moment for each beam and the 4k screen and mix it up and then they're putting them in half circle and Rob you this section are really good work environment workspace so having a single 4k screen that's curved and 50 inch or something I would actually replace our high speeds that would be a decent work environment for we play games to the issue numerous away in there also and you started to see these curved screen co-occur : screens in that size and basically management diversity of perfect gaming and perfect coordination while we're at it another vertical section screen so the focus is properly