We have experienced tearing issues quite a bit in the past apps that we’ve build in unity – and yes we have messed considerably with the in-unity ‘vsync settings’ in the past to no avail.
From my initial fast read - it appears that the G-sync feature may solve the mystery of tearing that several of us have experienced over time - especially when it comes to multi-screen unity apps.
Has anyone tested this technology with multi-screen unity apps? Would love to hear more if so!
thanks,
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It seems useful. What I’d also like to see is much faster response times on LCD screens so that when you scroll things you don’t get a mind-numbingly horrible amount of motion blur, especially for 2d scrolling games. The amount of blur from how slowly the pixel brightness dissipates totally destroys and possibility of having a fast scrolling game with any kind of crispness or detail. Somewhere along the lines in the past decade or two this seems to have been totally overlooked, whereas the old CRT screens had absolutely no problem with this.
Great perspective (pun intended). I hadn’t thought about it from that side of things. I wonder if using g-sync in combination with a high refresh rate lcd screen would allow this. e.g. i have a samsung tv which (according to the specs) has a refresh rate of 240hz.
But i do agree with what you’re saying and although there have been thousands of posts saying the human eye can’t see a difference above 60hz/60fps, there must be techniques/effects which could leverage higher refresh rates–thereby creating a better visual experience. However, this is a hard thing to tackle either as an individual or a community.
The majority of the focused development (where the money is made) almost always needs to keep the concept of minimum system requirements in mind. Also - when we have a strong and focused team on-board for a project, we don’t have time to focus on such things. However, the R&D on this could definitely pay off (i think).
imaginary - do you have any specific 2D scrollers that you can point to which look remarkably better on crt vs. lcd or was that more of a general observation?
Refresh rate isn’t the same as response time. Refresh rate is the amount of times per second that the screen gets redrawn while the response time is the amount of time it takes for a single refresh to happen. A 60hz screen could have a 16ms response time but it may also have an 8ms response time, which would look at lot smoother without actually having a higher refresh rate. There’s not much point in screens getting past 60hz in my opinion, as the games which it really would matter have a hard time pushing past 60 fps (or even hitting 60fps) so it wouldn’t actually make much difference unless you’re going for 3D viewing, however faster response time makes a huge difference as it helps with the blurring problems of small, fast moving, high-contrast details (such as the star backgrounds in old side-scrolling shooters, where individual pixels go from fully lit to completely black in a single frame).
Obviously higher refresh rate can be a by-product of quicker response time, and older games on modern hardware (or modern games on lower settings or just less demanding games) would certainly make use good use of the higher refresh rates., it’s just that response time seems a lot more important.
There have been reports that G-sync causes some elements such as text to be less sharp, however that could well be due to the screen hitting the limits of it’s response time. Combine G-Sync with much faster response times and it will be a big time winner.
I’ve seen these in practice, not in Unity games, but it’s a significant improvement IMO. Makes games look much smoother when running lower fps, so something that is in 45 fps, for instance, looks way smoother than it would on a standard monitor.
The downside of this product is Nvidia cannot effectively market it. Its completely impossible to physically show anyone how it works online or on TV. Could well end up a niche product.
Well I had my heart set on making a fast-scrolling sidescroller shootemup thing and was making headway with it until I added some enemy sprites and saw them flying across the screen in a horibble blurry mess which made it really hard to focus my eyes and quite headache inducing. Pretty much destroyed that one. There’s been solutions proposes such as a much brighter LED backlight which strobes at a high rate so that the brightness of pixel values can diminish to near to zero before the next frame. Right now there seems to be several frames of lag.
Same is largely true with HDTVs, and I think like those, this will be a value feature people look for when looking for a new monitor. Most people wouldn’t run out to get one because of g-sync, but when they are in the market for a new monitor, it’ll make a good impact on what they choose.
Agreed, 4K gaming was a bit of a flop. People want the best FPS possible and for that you need a high-end GPU at that resolution. Unfortunately not many people were willing to make that investment. This problem was compounded by the fact its impossible to see on screen, only in person can you see its (expensive) benefits.
I even think G-Sync has more impact than 4K, but I’m pretty sensitive to motion artifacts. Looking at a G-Sync monitor compared to normal is so significant to me I’d easily pay an extra $100 for the feature on a primary gaming monitor. I think it’ll do well, even if it has a slow initial adoption rate.
I did want to mention that one of the problematic issues with static refresh monitors is that you are using a static refresh rate to display images that are fed often with mismatched passages of time. You can do framerate smoothing and try to match sync rates, that helps, but most games just pass a variable time, then try to display that, and like to run without v-sync. The problem is that what is displayed on the monitor is effectively random in terms of how it syncs to the time it was ‘made for’, and unless running at an even divisor of monitor refresh rate, the passage of time perceived on different parts of the monitor will be inconsistent. So although tearing is an issue that people can easily identify, IMO this motion artifact is equally damaging, just not easy to ‘see’.
