Nvidia announces support for competitor’s FreeSync Monitors in a surprise

Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia released a bomb of news at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by announcing FreeSync support. No longer are owners of Nvidia GPUs forced to purchase very pricey G-Sync-labeled monitors to experience one of the more substantial technological upgrades that has come to monitors in decades.

First up, a primer on the purpose and goal of FreeSync and G-Sync. Modern monitors present images on the screen in fixed intervals of time. This so-called Refresh Rate of the monitor determines how fast a new image can be shown. The most widely used refresh rate is 60Hz, meaning the screen gets updated with a new image 60 times every second.

It’s important not to mix up refresh rate with frame rate. The former is the technical specification of the monitor while the later is the performance of how many new images (or frames) the computer can churn out each second. And this is where the crux of the issue lies. When the monitor receives a steady 60 frames per second from the PC (or console, the issue is the same), it will perfectly align with the refresh rate of the monitor.

But if there is a mismatch between the refresh rate and the frame rate, an annoying visual artifact in form of Tearing appears. This manifests in form of a tearing line horizontally across the screen and every gamer has experienced this. You could always buy a more beefy GPU to never fall below your monitor’s refresh rate but that is not cheap.

Much simpler is syncing the monitor’s refresh rate to the frame rate of the game, called Variable Refresh Rate or Adaptive Sync. This eliminates tearing completely and leads to a more fluid and pleasant gaming experience. Nvidia first released their solution for VRR on 2015 with the introduction of G-Sync-enabled monitors. The GPU manufacturer decided to create a proprietary standard with G-Sync instead of going for a vendor-spanning industry standard. This led to G-Sync monitors consistently costing several hundred dollars more than its competitor AMD’s FreeSync monitors.

With today’s announcement, all this changes however. Nvidia will release a new driver update on January 15 which will enable 10 series Nvidia GPUs to support FreeSync monitors. A great policy change that will enable customers to experience tear-free gaming on the cheap. For now, 12 FreeSync monitors have passed Nvidia’s tests and are officially supported but it needs to be noted that users will be able to use FreeSync across all monitors with the technology nonetheless.

Check out the press release for further details.