Tuesday, 13 May 2014

The death spiral of Nvidia’s G-Sync has begun

VESA announces implementation of an enhanced Adaptive-Sync to the DisplayPort Standard.




The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the international standards body for computer display, ratified the DisplayPort 1.2a standard late Monday which included a new version of Adaptive-Sync, complete with enhancements from the variable refresh rate technology from AMD once known as FreeSync.

“DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync enables a new approach in display refresh technology,” said Syed Athar Hussain, Display Domain Architect, AMD and VESA Board Vice Chairman, in the announcing press release. “Instead of updating a monitor at a constant rate, Adaptive-Sync enables technologies that match the display update rate to the user’s content, enabling power efficient transport over the display link and a fluid, low-latency visual experience.”

Variable refresh rate technology like Adaptive-Sync seek so smooth out the game play experience, by only refreshing the monitor as fast as the GPU can pump out graphics. Nvidia was first to the market with such a technology, announcing its proprietary G-Sync technology at an event last fall in Montreal then demonstrating it once again at CES in January.*Adaptive-Sync is not entirely new per se, it has been around in one form or another in 2009. What’s important about this announcement is that Adaptive-Sync is now part of the DisplayPort standard and will now be enhanced with AMD’s FreeSync technology, enabling the stutter-free experience that Nvidia showed off with G-Sync to be experienced. Since this technology is part of the VESA DisplayPort standard, most display manufacturers will be launching screens that support this standard later this year.

“VESA’s DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync offers an industry-standard and licensing-free communication framework that technologies, like AMD’s Project FreeSync, can utilize to bring dynamic refresh rates to gamers,” AMD’s Robert Hallock, a spokesperson for the company, said in a statement sent to VR-Zone. “Dynamic refresh rates promise to be a huge boon for gamers, who will enjoy smoother gameplay and a total elimination of input lag or tearing characteristic of gaming with and without vsync, respectively.”

For Nvidia this represents the beginning of the death of its proprietary G-Sync standard. AMD and VESA are effectively now offering the same thing as part of the new DisplayPort standard — sans the lucrative license fee Nvidia has been charging OEMs. It will be interesting to see what Nvidia does with the technology: a quick unceremonious death (perhaps like the GeForce GTX Titan Z), or perhaps it might drop the license fee entirely and give the technology away. In the end, this is another example of why proprietary standards don’t work.



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