As a bit of a win for everyone, NVIDIA have announced that they will be supporting VESA Adaptive Sync.
While NVIDIA have been pushing their own proprietary G-SYNC to get rid of screen tearing, AMD has been pushing the more open FreeSync. Annoying as always, since it splits the market for us consumers and makes things more difficult for us.
Announced a few hours ago, NVIDIA will be supporting some FreeSync monitors with their own special branding. They claim there's a huge difference in how well some monitors work and so they will be testing various monitors and approving them.
To start with, they will support these monitors:
However, it's not totally down to NVIDIA on what monitors will work. They will be including an option in the NVIDIA control panel for you to try yourself:
For VRR monitors yet to be validated as G-SYNC Compatible, a new NVIDIA Control Panel option will enable owners to try and switch the tech on - it may work, it may work partly, or it may not work at all.
Additionally, it seems they will only be supporting this across GeForce GTX 10-Series and GeForce RTX 20-Series graphics cards so my lowly 980ti is out of luck.
They say a new driver will be out later this month, although it's not entirely clear what the status of Linux support will be. Hopefully there won't be any issues, since as far as I can tell G-SYNC is supported on Linux already.
See more on the official NVIDIA post.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
trawzified Jan 7, 2019
da_habakuk Jan 7, 2019
time to say goodbye to proprietary nvidia blob - i couldnt be happier.
this polaris card is the best linux driver experience i had in a long time... so freesync it will be anyways as a prefer open standards.
You have to make sure the game window covers the whole Xorg screen or else you'll get no flipping. If there's even one pixel that doesn't belong to the same application, flipping turns off (and any syncing with it). That means if you have more than one monitor and the desktop is spanning across them you're likely left with blit only. On Windows there's an "exclusive fullscreen mode" and from what I heard it turns off other displays while the game is running and active. On Linux maybe compositing would help as it's essentially a big window that draws the actual windows inside of it so it can be flipped. YMMV as always.
I also have a very specific bug related to network namespaces (I doubt many people would hit it). Quite surprisingly, Arthur Huillet found me on IRC and we had a productive chat about this issue, I hope it will be fixed one day. For now I'm using that kernel hack I did.
Other than that G-Sync works great. No tearing, perfect response time, just what games should look like. The downside is its price (and of course being NVIDIA-only tech but that's not an issue for me), my monitor is about 1.75x more expensive than a freesync analog with similar specs.
It's a bit annoying that you cannot use the secondary screens while gaming, but it is what it is and I can live with it. It would be cool, though, if the secondary screens would be automatically turned off just like in Windows.
Quoting: trawzThat's really nice, I hope that sometime AMD will support G-Sync Displays aswell. I'm very happy with my Dell S2417DG, but it would suck to lose functionality if I want to switch to an AMD card.
G-Sync is proprietary and the chances of AMD being able to support it is basically NULL even if they wanted to.
Good to see the open standard is prevailing.
I.e. to clarify why it can be different. In the first case it means that Linux graphics stack implementing support for adaptive sync will work with Nvidia blob and freesync monitor. In the second case, Nvidia will still require graphics stack to support gsync to work, it just will use adaptive sync between driver and monitor to implement it.
Last edited by Shmerl on 7 January 2019 at 12:13 pm UTC
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