FreeSync on NVidia

Not many people aware that recently NVidia enable their video cards to work with FreeSync monitors. If you don’t know what is FreeSync then you can stop reading and search internet about it. But just to better understand what happens here there is short history.

Sometime ago NVidia introduced G-Sync that suppose to “reducing tearing and stuttering caused by misalignment with content's frame rate”. It does this very well, but it is proprietary, expensive and works only with NVidia video cards. Monitor vendors should pay royalty to NVidia and final products are quite expensive. Moreover, it requires to use specific proprietary hardware. And lastly NVidia will certify monitor before it will have badge “G-Sync”. All of these adds a lot of cost and as result this technology present almost always only on premium gaming monitors. Cheapest monitor with G-Sync will cost about $350.

Sometime later AMD introduced similar technology called FreeSync. It is royalty-free, and it uses VESA Adaptive-Sync standard that part of modern Display Port standard. As result it is cost very little to add this feature to monitor. As result a lot of budget monitors have this technology. You can find one as low as $99.

Ok, now back to story. What shocked me most that hardware to support this was added in GForce 10 series of Nvidia GPU. And some people found ways to enable it earlier but Nvidia always closing such loopholes. But as result people started to talk about this subject a lot and I believe that this finally forced Nvidia to officially enable FreeSync on their products.

But it is not all. Nvidia enabled FreeSync but claimed a lot of FreeSync monitors can have different sort of issues (flickering, color issues etc) and if you want to have trouble-free sync then you should choose G-Sync monitor. And a lot people saying that this is BS. If monitor works fine with AMD it should work with Nvidia as well. After all it is standard. Otherwise Nvidia didn’t implement it properly. For example, you can find review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icJnTUAaB9Y. These guys tested 7 FreeSync monitors and all of them works fine except one that didn’t have DisplayPort connector. Nvidia supports FreeSync only on DisplayPort. I would recommend watching this video as it explains a lot.

Personally, for me it leaves really bad aftertaste. Nvidia resist on supporting FreeSync for quite some time. And even when their video cards can do it, they intentionally block it. And only when it became obvious that it creates bad company image, they finally do support it. I don’t know about you, but I found this bad business practice. They just use fact that major market share belongs to them and abuse it. It is not customers they care about but their profits as cost of customers.