Gadgetory

our coverage of CES 2019 is brought to you by D brand the D brand grip cased is super grippy and protects your phone and their prism screen protectors well those protect your screen and they're pretty darn impressive check them out at the link below five years ago Nvidia announced their g-sync variable refresh rate gaming technology which promised to eliminate to persistent bugbears of PC gaming stutter and tearing that is as long as you were willing to pay a significant premium to the tune of 200 to 300 dollars for your display and of course it was only available to gamers with GeForce graphics cards well today or rather I should say January 15th when the driver drops that all changes okay you'll still need a GeForce graphics card that's not going to change but NVIDIA is finally joining AMD and Intel in supporting adaptive sync the open variable refresh rate standard that was added to DisplayPort 1.2 a three years ago and that is basically exactly what it sounds like so you can take any old adaptive sync variable refresh rate monitor so this is one right here from Samsung there we go you can plug your GeForce graphics card into it go into the Nvidia driver and boom turn on G sync and it gets even better NVIDIA has already gone through literally hundreds of these monitors with the intention of testing every existing adaptive sync monitor on the market and actually gone as far as to certify the dozen or so of them that they feel meet their standards and enable G sync by default as soon as you plug it in and this is at zero cost to both the consumer and the monitor manufacturer in fact one of the certified once was part of AMD's initial wave of free sync compatible displays three years ago it's crazy right now there's no support for TVs at this time because G sync doesn't work over HDMI and so I guess uh NVIDIA has got to sell a handful of these BFG DS once they're finally released later this quarter but they aren't ruling out HDMI support in the future either so we're gonna have to see how that develops now I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is so - what happens then - the original G sync with you know the module and everything and what about G sync HDR contrary to what you might think they are not going away see there's one right next to the compatible ones and the non validated ones so while NVIDIA acknowledges that some of these adaptive sync displays do deliver a pretty good experience they have found that the vast majority of them will exhibit undesirable behaviors from ones as obvious as blanking out occasionally to ones that you might not think of like just having a very narrow hook look at that to ones that might just have a very narrow variable refresh rate window that's not actually practical for delivering a good gaming experience so they maintain that an end-to-end solution all the way from the graphics card to the driver to the display module to the validation of the panel is the best one so regular G sync with the module stays the way it is and gsync HDR becomes G sync ultimate and honestly this makes sense to me when the display has in videos module in if they're involved in its creation from start to finish working with both the panel and display manufacturers to test and tune every aspect of its image quality and performance and through this process they can achieve some things that I haven't seen elsewhere like adaptive pixel overdrive across the variable refresh rate range backlight strobing for very little motion blur with variable refresh rate and very wide adaptive refresh rate windows down to as low as one Hertz I mean nobody actually wants to game at one frame per second but it's one of those things where like hey if you can do it then why not but the big question everyone's mind right now has to be why why why now well the marketing spin is we just wanted to make gaming better for gamers everywhere but okay come on now I'm here in the Nvidia booth so this might not be a popular thing to say but I have a hard time believing that this is some kind of benevolent effort to make gaming as a whole better I mean if that kind of a monumental shift in in videos business had taken place I'm sure the Linux gamers virtualization enthusiasts and folks like us who are trying to save output list mining cards from ending up in an e-waste pile somewhere would have been the first to notice rather what this looks like to me is exactly the sort of shrewd power play that we have come to expect from Nvidia by opening up monitor support they are eliminating one of the key reasons that users turn to AMD graphics cards to get variable refresh rate gaming which when done well really is a better experience without paying the g-sync tax which kills the deal in a lot of cases as for the longer term Nvidia won't discuss licensing and certification or any other fees that we know exist for current g-sync branded products like the regular old DisplayPort displays on g-sync notebooks but to me this also looks like Nvidia is opening the doors in the future for creating a similar program to what they have on notebooks for certified desktop displays now I doubt they're just gonna turn around and start charging for a certification that they just did and it was a lot of work for free they generally take a more slow boil approach from my experience so here's the way I see it going down they start taking requests for certification for manufacturers earlier in the process now that everyone knows about it they reject the ones that aren't good enough they point at how much better the certified displays are moving out in the market and then they offer to be more involved in the development process of your monitor next time around for a fee now I could be wrong of course and Nvidia could be purely motivated by delivering a better gaming experience to gamers but the good news is that it actually doesn't matter oops I didn't drop that I wasn't over there whatever the good news is that whatever invidious intention was this really is a great day for gamers it really is a better experience speaking of better experiences our CES coverage is just a better experience with D bread D brand's grip cases super grippy and features Lynas proof impact protection in characteristic D brand fashion it's got precise cutouts for everything from your fingerprint sensor to your camera and it's got their trademark super clicky buttons as for their prism screen protector this thing is really impressive it comes with an applicator that makes it easy to get a perfect fit every time it's feel is very glass like even though it offers impact protection that simply wouldn't be possible with tempered glass like this thing is unbelievable you can literally take the screen of your phone and hammer a nail into a block of wood not that I'm necessarily recommending that you do that you can peel the prism off and your screen well mine anyway okay your mileage may vary I don't want to be held liable or whatever like don't nail hammer nails in with your phone but my screen was still in pristine condition absolutely unbelievable so check out the V brand grip and D brand prism at the links below and thanks to D brand for sponsoring our coverage of CES 2019 also thanks to you guys for watching make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss any of our coverage here at the show