GTX & RTX Series Freesync Compatibility – What does it mean?

Recently, NVIDIA announced that they were testing adaptive sync technology between AMD FreeSync compatible monitors and GTX 10 and RTX 20 series graphics cards, which have relied on G-SYNC adaptive sync. NVIDIA’s G-SYNC is a proprietary technology that has been the adaptive sync standard that NVIDIA’s cards have used for years. Monitors that are G-SYNC compatible often cost more than their FreeSync compatible counter parts, and with the increased prices that the RTX 20 series graphics cards brought, consumers were having trouble justifying the increased prices. NVIDIA decided to implement FreeSync compatibility in their graphics cards in an effort to gain market share, taking away one of the few reasons to stick with AMD Radeon graphics cards. Unfortunately for AMD, who haven’t released a significant gaming GPU in a while, it means that consumers are much more likely to buy a new RTX card because of the features (like raytracing) that it has, and, now that many popular FreeSync monitors are compatible with 10 and 20 series GTX and RTX cards, it makes more sense to buy the NVIDIA cards. 

Of course, there’s a catch. NVIDIA has tested over 400 FreeSync monitors, and have only found 12 monitors that have worked smoothly enough to be officially certified—the other hundreds of monitors may have sub-par adaptive sync performance. The non-certified ones often stutter from frame skipping, black frames, and instability. However, even with this draw back, it’s still great for consumers. It’s still quite possible that even more monitors will end up being approved with possible driver updates for the graphics cards. If NVIDIA makes more monitors compatible with their graphics cards, they are going to be unstoppable for the next few months.