When G-SYNC technology first hit the market, the vast majority of monitors lacked variable refresh rate technologies, which is an understatement to say that the graphics card communicates with the monitor to control the vertical synchronization of the monitor. Such a capability had not been contemplated in any video standard until then, but it was a good slap on the wrist for the industry. The first to realize this, of course, was VESA, which created the Adaptive Sync standard, forcing NVIDIA to improve its own and AMD to use it under a new name, FreeSync.
This is how NVIDIA’s G-SYNC is dying
One of NVIDIA’s key points with G-SYNC is that it requires additional hardware to work, which has to be built into the monitor and isn’t exactly cheap. Although it offers better features than Adaptive Sync and its derivatives, this is where the so-called good enough eventually kicks in and most users don’t want to pay a considerable premium for the solution of the brand of Jen Hsen Huang.
This board you see in the image above consists of an Intel FPGA and a series of DDR memory sockets. There’s no G-SYNC chip for this because the volume is low enough that you can’t get a much cheaper ASIC to do the job. In other words, the number of users who buy a monitor supporting said technology is not enough to justify a processor for said monitors.
And how much can it cost? Well, they are not sold directly, but from 500 dollars in large volumes they do not go down. The funny thing is that an ASIC would cost 10 times less than the whole thing. Otherwise, the feature has already been built into DisplayPort ports for years and any graphics display controller that supports it may already support Adaptive Sync at no extra cost, as the process is built into the transmitter itself and to the video receiver. Add to that the existence of VRR support in HDMI 2.1 and you already have the final nail in the coffin.
Don’t worry about me, I’m already dead
One of NVIDIA’s trade traps is G-SYNC compatible, which refers to graphics cards intended for use with monitors with Adaptive Sync. Ultimately, they’re looking to solve the same problem and that’s the only way for them to perpetuate their brand, at least until people’s interest dies out completely or gets low enough.
That is to say, the vast majority of screens we see in stores, despite the initials on the box or on the casing, do not use specialized circuits and are simple monitors with DisplayPort connections. Which means saving money for manufacturers and not having to support a monitor outside of market price just because it has the infamous green eye mark.
