Mantle? TrueAudio? Physx? All these exclusive or manufacturer driven technologies are all nonsense that force people to pick and choose GPU manufacturers based on features that their favorite games are using.
However if there’s one feature that I would choose one GPU vendor over another for, it would be for NVIDIA’s G-Sync.
AnandTech described it best:
The basic premise is simple. Displays refresh themselves at a fixed interval, but GPUs render frames at a completely independent frame rate. The disconnect between the two is one source of stuttering. You can disable v-sync to try and work around it but the end result is at best tearing, but at worst stuttering and tearing.
NVIDIA’s G-Sync is a combination of software and hardware technologies that allows a modern GeForce GPU to control a variable display refresh rate on a monitor equipped with a G-Sync module. In traditional setups a display will refresh the screen at a fixed interval, but in a G-Sync enabled setup the display won’t refresh the screen until it’s given a new frame from the GPU.
The G-Sync system is the gaming display technology we’ve always needed. Eliminating screen tearing and achieving pitch perfect display refreshes at all variable rates without the need to enable Vsync and triple buffering reduces input latency without sacrificing image quality. Even if I’m running a game at 60 FPS, this technology will also reduce the amount of judder I often see as well.
There’s only two downsides to G-sync thus far.
- It’s an NVIDIA exclusive technology
- It will initially be only available for the ASUS VG248QE.
The latter will be addressed with additional panels and manufacturers. I hope we see an 2560 x 1440 IPS panel with this technology. The former? I doubt we’ll see NVIDIA open this spec for their rivals to use as well which is a damn shame.
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