News
News Categories

It's official, G-Sync is coming to notebooks

By Kenny Yeo - on 1 Jun 2015, 6:10am

It's official, G-Sync is coming to notebooks

ASUS has an updated model of its ROG G751 notebook with G-Sync capability.

NVIDIA has just announced that its G-Sync technology is now available on selected notebook models from major gaming notebook brands such as ASUS, Aorus and MSI.

G-Sync was first announced in late 2013 and is a technology that aims to eradicate lag, stutter and tearing from games. Very briefly, these problems arise because of an incompatibility between the GPU draw rates and the monitor’s refresh rates. So to solve it, G-Sync forces monitors to refresh whenever the GPU finishes drawing the frame, this also means G-Sync enabled monitors must have variable refresh rates. In fact, monitors that support G-Sync have variable refresh rates that can go as high as 144Hz to as low as 30Hz. We covered this in greater detail in our original coverage article here.

Already, there are numerous desktop monitors that support G-Sync, such as ASUS’ awesome Swift ROG PG278, but notebook gamers have had to wait. Fortunately, the wait is over.

Beginning today, major gaming notebook brands such as ASUS, Aorus and MSI have announced updated models of their gaming notebooks that will come with displays that support G-Sync. The reason for the delay is presumably because of a lack of displays that can comply with NVIDIA’s requirements for enabling G-Sync.

During the briefing by NVIDIA, it was also revealed that G-Sync on notebooks is an entirely software-based implementation, unlike desktop monitors which require a special custom G-Sync module as a go-between.

This is because unlike desktop monitors, notebook displays do not require a scaler chip as the notebook display is typically driven only by a single source - the notebook itself. Desktop monitors can be used with a multitude of different sources, such as desktop systems, notebooks, TV settop boxes, gaming consoles, etc. Hence the need for a special G-Sync modules on desktop monitors.

As mentioned, notebooks support G-Sync will be available from now and we expect to see more being announced over the next couple of days at Computex 2015.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.