NVidia G-Sync and vsync in emulation

[Toni Wilen]

NVidia's new "G-Sync" (announced yesterday) will also allow stable vsync in emulation without any usual vsync side-effects!

Insted of emulator needing to sync to display's current refresh rate, display is now fully synced to emulator, G-Sync display keeps showing same frame until complete new frame has been received from computer.

Frame rate does not matter anymore, it can freely change between frames. Full vsync-like mode from ~30Hz to over 100Hz is now possible, fully adjustable. No side-effects.

This appears to be really great technology! (But it should have been standard, not yet another manufacturer specific "hack") It seems it should automatically work with any emulator (and games of course) that have fullscreen mode without vsync enabled.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7436/n...via-smoothness

[rare_j]

Sounds really good, almost too good.
The catch being that you have to have the monitor to go with it. We'll have to wait and see if any of the monitors are any good apart from the g-sync.

I read something about it bring displayport compatible but didn't really understand that bit. Are they saying uou can use this with any monitor with a displayport?

Yeah I agree it sounds good also, BUT, it is propriety technology as it ONLY works with NVidia cards, and then only GT650 Ti and above.

What would have been better is if as Toni said it worked with cards from every manufacturer.

One day NVidia will release something that is beneficial for everyone, and not just something to try and lock everyone into there technology.

[Gaula92]

Similar and awesome results can be archeved by using RetroArch with it's cores: RetroArch is NOT only a menu for emulator but a complete I/O API aiming at lagless and smooth screen updates. It *already* does this: it forces the emulators to run at the monitor's physical refresh rate.
Use RetroArch on a Linux system WITHOUT X11, use it's EGL/GLES backend, and you'll get perfectly lagless emulation. Vsync's associated lag won't show up as you have the emulated system synced to monitor refresh rate, and the video buffer is "fenced".
It works on Intel chips with perfect results and even a lowly Raspberry Pi is able to provide NES, Master System, PC-Engine and MegaDrive & MegaCD smooth emulation thanks to this.

Nvidia, **** you and your propietary scum.

[Toni Wilen]

Yes? What does this have to do with G-Sync? Totally different ways to have similar results.

Currently all emulators _have to_ do it this way (Use vsync and prevent latency by not using any extra buffers and still keep sync or also use custom drivers/hardware which are usually needed to keep latency low without side-effects) without g-sync and it is not trivial to make it work very well.

G-Sync is much better. It just works without any extra code or support.

It also allows on the fly refresh rate changes, PAL/NTSC switches will be instant like on real hardware (if connected to CRT). This is simply not possible because normal displays have really slow rate change detection and vsync syncro would be lost anyway for a while.

It can also allow emulator speed adjustments in vsync mode, without losing smoothess. This is quite nice trick.

It probably also allow lightboost-like backlight strobe at the same time (At least we can always hope) = no LCD motion blur artifacts. (Pre-emptive reply: yes,there is blur that shouldn't be there when objects move, you probably only see the difference, and it is huge, when compared with lightboost display. Then you can't anymore use vsynced emulator with normal display..)

Only problem is it is being NVidia only but someone has to do it for the first time. (and open source operating systems will probably have reverse-engineered support anyway)

Maybe there will be standard in future because variable refresh rate is soooo much more flexible than boring static, which is mostly artifact that refuses to die from CRT era.

[RCK]

I also would like to have hand on such g-sync monitor, this sound very promising