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everygamer
Up and Coming
December 22, 2013

Oculus & Nvidia G-Sync

I was wondering if the Oculus team has been keeping an eye on the new G-Sync tech that Nvidia has been talking about lately, which allows the display to refresh in sync with the graphics cards frame rate. It appears to have very little latency overhead, and basically eliminates a lot of the tear/blur artifacts with motion in rendered scenes. A lot of games at high settings require large investments in graphic card tech to push a high frame rate so that it doesn't fall below the 60hz standard for a monitor, by allowing the monitor to fresh at variable frame rate matching the video card it decreases some of the hardware requirements for higher quality settings. Might be worth looking into to help keep the support hardware costs down for the rift if it supported the G-Sync tech. It also might help with motion sickness since the blur/tearing/stutter effects are not as apparent and decrease image distortion. I wouldn't suggest making it require g-sync, but it might be interesting if it supported it.

Link to G-Sync on Nvidia's site ...
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/g-sync

Tom's Hardware review of the Tech which goes into the specifics as to how it works and some of their testing results ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/g-sync-v-sync-monitor,3699.html

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    antigravity
    Up and Coming
    December 27, 2013
    "rc" wrote:
    G-Sync sounds like a cool piece of tech. But the fact that it's vendor-specific really irks me.


    Yeah.. That's a bummer.

    But when you think about it, the only way we're ever going to get away from two decades of vsync issues, frame tearing, and back to the zero latency days of crt gaming is from a vendor specific solution.. It would be great if the industry as a whole tackled it with an open solution and set of standards, but that's not on the horizon.

    Thinking about it further, even if they went with NVidia GSync panels- That probably means it could be powered by other video cards in a traditional way minus the G-Sync support. although I wouldn't be surprised if the functionality could eventually be hacked onto other cards.

    Also I did a little more research, g-sync can be enabled on any existing kepler based nvidia card.. So that's like the GTX 650 on up.
    Tbone
    Up and Coming
    December 27, 2013
    "antigravity" wrote:
    My understanding of it, and I could be wrong, was that most nvidia cards would be automatically "g-sync enabled" from drivers.. So allegedly a gtx-480 from a few years ago could power a g-sync device.

    I thought it was only the most recent Titan cards, but it seems to be around 650 (Ti Boost) and up: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/g-sync/supported-gpus

    So that's a bit more of a spread, but still pretty limiting if it is to be considered "mandatory" to the device.
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