It only took 11 years. Nvidia is finally doing away with its proprietary G-Sync module that’s been the bane of the best gaming monitors for several years. Although Nvidia eventually started offering G-Sync branding with any variable refresh rate (VRR) tech, display brands have still needed to shell out for a dedicated G-Sync module for proper certification — and pass along that cost to customers. Going forward, the G-Sync module is no more.
Nvidia’s G-Sync tech isn’t going anywhere, however. The company announced that it partnered with Mediatek to add every G-Sync feature to Mediatek scalers. If you’re unfamiliar, a scaler is basically a small chip inside your monitor that handles resolution scaling, along with a bunch of other processing including the on-screen display (OSD), color adjustments, HDR, and input selection. The G-Sync module itself was a scaler. Now that you’ll rarely find a gaming monitor without its own scaler, those features are being rolled into the chip already built into the display.
Nvidia hasn’t said which Mediatek chips it’s adding G-Sync features to, nor if there are any restriction on using it. Hopefully, the change means that you’ll get a suite of G-Sync features without even thinking about it. Mediatek’s chips are by far the most popular on the market, which should mean you get the full G-Sync range in most gaming displays. The recent Alienware 32 QD-OLED, for example, uses the Mediatek MT9810, which is what enables Dolby Vision HDR support.
Although we don’t know which scalers will come with G-Sync features, Nvidia confirmed that the full range of G-Sync features is arriving. Here’s the list:
- Variable refresh rate
- Variable overdrive
- 12-bit color
- Ultra Low Motion Blur (ULMB)
- Low latency HDR
- Nvidia Reflex analyzer
- Nvidia Pulsar
Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
The Nvidia Reflex analyzer is a big inclusion, and one of the main things that have separated G-Sync displays from open standards like FreeSync and VESA’s Adaptive Sync. It shows up in monitors like Alienware’s 500Hz gaming display, and it allows you to see a slew of metrics concerning input lag.
Pulsar is also a big inclusion. This is a piece of tech that concerns motion clarity. It doesn’t boost the refresh rate of the monitor, but Nvidia says it provides motion clarity to over 1,000Hz by syncing the monitor’s backlight strobing to the variable refresh rate. At Gamescom, Nvidia revealed the first three monitors launching with Pulsar, which you can see below.
The death of the G-Sync module is a huge boost for gaming monitors as a whole. We’ll no longer need to wait for separate G-Sync and FreeSync versions of displays, as we had to with the Alienware 34 QD-OLED, and you won’t need to dig through each display you’re interested in to see if it supports the G-Sync features you want. You’ll still need an Nvidia GPU to use G-Sync features, but this change should make the display side of things much easier to digest.
