Huge numbers of new FreeSync monitors are arriving these days, and LG’s new 32QK500-W is no exception.

While the upper VRR limit is only 75 Hz, it has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 and a 10-bit-capable IPS panel at a resonable price, so it is sure to attract some attention from casual gamers who prioritize great movie-watching quality for their bedroom, while also having FreeSync for XBox One consoles.

Its 8ms GtG response time is fairly average, but the viewing angles and overall ergonomics are good compensation, especially for the price. 75 Hz max refresh rate is still a good 25% better than 60hz, and definitely noticeable, while setting the monitor to 72 Hz allows 3:3 pulldown to watch 24 fps movies smoothly without needing to change your desktop refresh rate constantly.

With PC monitors, it’s often difficult to know if their support for 1.07 billion colours is achieved via FRC (dithering) on an 8-bit panel, but it should still deliver smoother gradients than monitors which are limited to 8-bit. This is especially apparent in skies so viewing 10-bit content (even tone mapped HDR content) should look better than native 8-bit.

This monitor delivers sRGB gamut in standard dynamic range (SDR), as well as gamer-friendly features such as Crosshair, Black Stabilizer, and Dynamic Action Sync to reduce input lag.

It’s important to note here that FreeSync only works over its two HDMI inputs, but there is also a DisplayPort and mini-Displayport included, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Christmas has come early to PC gamers this year, in the form of the spectacular new Geforce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards.

I just received mine, hurrah, so I have a more powerful graphics card than Chief Blur Buster currently has! Now Chief can be jealous until NVIDIA gives him one (har har).

Depending on where you live, it is still very hard to find stock of these cards, and I expect the soon-to-be-released 2070, at a much more affordable price point, might be even harder. I used NowInStock.Net to get an immediate notification and order mine the second it popped up.

Show us the goods, pics or it didn’t happen:

The suspense is killing me!

What a beauty. I picked the Gigabyte model mostly because my new AMD Threadripper 2, 32-core workstation is built around a Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme X399 motherboard, and wanted some consistency. Plus it showed up earlier on my stock alert notification, bonus.

Virtually all the 2080 Tis have the default 3 x DP 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2.0b and 1 x VirtuaLink USB-C connector.

Since I have only one G-Sync monitor, an Acer XB270HU, and the rest of my displays (various monitors and projectors) use HDMI, I bought a pair of DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.0b adapters from Amazon, to connect to some of the new dual-cable VR headsets coming out soon, either the StarVR One or the Pimax 5K+, which, incidentally, I intend to review at some point for Blurbusters.

It’s better this way than having more HDMI 2.0b connectors on the card which have lower max bandwidth, and aside from currently-non-existent VirtuaLink VR headsets, I’ve heard about native DisplayPort VR headsets coming out too.

The backplate on this card is super nice, almost like plate armor which aside from cosmetics also apparently helps with cooling. Nice, errr, backside, baby!

By way of an overdue introduction, my name is Bela, and I’m a AAA graphics engineer and semi-retired from the grind after ten long years of grueling hard work, and now making indie VR games and doing graphics and machine learning research, when I’m not playing VR games of course. I’ve always been a big fan of this site and have mad projects cooking with Mark, the owner here, and good things are coming, so stay tuned!

To me and many others out there, VR is a childhood dream come true, and while it’s still experiencing growing pains, let me just say, I’m very excited to play all my VR game catalog over with my new 2080 Ti.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Beat Saber, Skyrim VR, and looking forward to playing In Death and other newer titles on this card. When I do benchmarking it will be primarily VR-focused.  Perhaps “bench-marketing” would be a better term, although I don’t consider myself an Nvidia fanboy by any means, the truth is AMD has a lot of catching up to do. Benchmarks bring website visits to the sites hosting them, as well as sell cards (provided they do well or offer good value), that’s really their purpose so I think bench-marketing is apt and honest.

Most gaming sites don’t cater to VR games primarily in their testing, so we hope to provide something here at Blurbusters which is more specialized and unique that you can’t necessarily get elsewhere. When I do any direct GPU comparisons, it will be against my older, min-VR-spec GTX 970 which this card replaces. I tend to skip generations of GPUs to keep my upgrade budget reasonable, but the 970 was getting a bit behind the times, especially for VR which not only pushes our GPUs on resolution, but also demands a steady 90 Hz / 120 Hz framerate.

To folks out there rightly skeptical of marketing mumbo jumbo re: Ray Tracing, let me try to calm your nerves a bit: the new ray tracing acceleration tech exposed via DX12 (DXR) and new Vulkan extensions, that take advantage of these new cards’ capabilities, are going to be used extensively, and already are to great effect in in games like EA’s BattleField 5.

Aside from reflections and shadowing improvements (shadow maps, die!), there is a ton of relevant  academic and industry research going on in machine learning (ML), for example 1 sample-per-pixel SPP denoising of ray-traced global illumination (GI), which makes normally noisy Monte Carlo integration feasible, albeit at lower resolutions. GI makes a massive difference in the visual fidelity of games, and has tremendous gameplay implications too, like requiring less artificial lights to keep things going. I can only imaging what a Skyrim VR mod would look like where you could use realistic lighting and actually be able to walk around at night in the woods, by moonlight alone.

For traditional rasterized games, extra performance and quality boosts for 4K are achieved by Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), where Nvidia’s supercomputers scan existing games to optimize them in advance.

Aside from all that, hardware video acceleration is top notch. Since I hate low framerates in not only games, but movies too, I am a big fan of motion smoothing (sue me), and the performance of this card with SVP on UHD HDR rips (of UHD Blurays I purchased legally) is amazing. My GTX 970 couldn’t even decode UHD rips without dropping frames, without any interpolation enabled on my PC, but this new RTX 2080 Ti manages to bring 2160p24 high bitrate HDR content all the way to 1440p 144hz, barely breaking a sweat at 16-20% GPU occupancy. Highly recommended for smooth video nuts. MEMC (motion estimation) tech will only keep advancing too, with less artifacts expected with Nvidia’s latest slow motion research.

Some other thoughts with considering which cards to pick for VR use, is whether to consider SLI. My new motherboard is a full-sized EATX board with dual X16 slots, so that’s not a problem, HOWEVER, if I want to install a PCI-E 4X card, say, for Wigig wireless VR module for the HTX Vive, that’s where I could maybe run into some problems with a pair of 2.75 slot GPUs covering the rest of my spare x8 slots.

So, plan your build ahead! If I ever need a VR WiGig module, I believe I can replace the motherboard’s built-in 802.11 AC wifi card with the Intel one, but there is a Vive addon that uses a PCI-E 4X slot which could be a problem, unless I can squeeze a PCI-E riser ribbon under the RTX fans. For VR SLI builds, I’d therefore recommend a dual-slot GPU, like the Nvidia founder’s edition cards. Might run a bit slower than the beefier cooled versions, but you will still be able to use all your motherboard’s PCI-E slots for other things, without worrying about riser cables which can be flaky.

One last thing: make sure you get a beefy power supply!

Review sites are showing 300+ Watts used by overclocked RTX 2080 Tis, so 600 Watts for two GPUs if you go SLI. I think VR is the perfect use case for SLI, personally, and the new NVLink connector is quite robust in terms of performance scaling.

In my system, the CPU itself requires 800+ Watts, for an overclocked-to-4-Ghz 32-core AMD Threadripper. I figured 1600 Watts total was enough to handle anything I could throw at this system, so I got the highly rated EVGA model, the highly-rated Supernova 1600 T2.

P.S. My RTX 2080 also supports G-SYNC, as do all currently-on-market NVIDIA cards. Check out Supported NVIDIA GPUs for G-SYNC

Good luck and happy gaming!

As we start to begin anticipating the first 120Hz and 144Hz gaming OLEDs — from the OLED gaming monitor collaboration between JOLED and the Burning Core eSports team — we hear new OLED news.

There is a new 8K 120Hz OLED, in a form factor of 13.3 inches from Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) Japan! It has an incredible 663 pixels per inch at 7680×4320 resolution, crammed in a 13.3″ laptop sized panel.

Currently, these are only laboratory prototypes, but an incredible 120Hz at an incredible 8K resolution, will require quite a powerful GPU. SEL is looking for partners to fabricate their IGZO based OLEDs, as SEL does not have their production line.

While this size is too small for a gaming monitor, this could be a great panel for a top-of-the-line gaming laptop even for 4K games upscaled. And this will help add more 120 Hz OLED options to the market.

OLED also has the possible advantage of vastly superior lagless motion blur reduction via rolling scan strobing, so hopefully some vendors adds a low-persistence operation mode to OLED gaming monitors.

Even 120Hz will not be the final refresh rate in humankind (See 1000Hz Journey for an article of high acclaim!) without adding a impulsed/strobed mode. OLED-based VR headsets use impulse-based motion blur reduction techniques, including Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Motion blur can still affect OLEDs even at 120Hz, so motion blur reduction techniques are still needed.

It is exciting to finally see 120Hz OLEDs be very actively developed in multiple labs, with some (JOLED) looking potentially close to market.

Much thanks to a heads-up at AnandTech.

Three new gaming displays were just announced by IO Data, with the top model supporting 240 Hz refresh rate at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Their model names are EX-LDGC251UTB, LDGC241HTB2 and EX-LDGC251TB and offer 240 / 144 / 60 Hz refresh rates, respectively, at an affordable $142 to $380 USD price range.

These are all 24 or 24.5 inch brand new TN panels capable of 10-bit (8-bit + FRC) with a 0.6ms to 0.8ms response time, which is certainly respectable (and even necessary) to improve 240 Hz and higher refresh rates.

TN panels are also getting better all the time and even supposedly competitive with IPS in terms of colour reproduction at least, if not viewing angles. The native contrast ratio here is 1000:1 which is acceptable for a TN display, although HDR performance will be limited as a result of this.

The max brightness is 400 nits on the top model which limits HDR rendition. While I’d normally advise dimming the lights when watching HDR content on lower-brightness monitors, IO Data has included dark scene compensation tone mapping modes, and low latency inputs, to make everything look clear out of the box.

They have DisplayPort and either two or three HDMI 2.0 inputs (the LDGC241HTB2 has three).

What’s interesting is that these monitors offer HDR10 decoding but no variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies.

Normally, low-priced LCD gaming monitors at least support FreeSync for VRR. This requires you have an AMD video card or the XBOX One console.

It is not known at this time whether they have low-persistence backlight modes, like ULMB, so might be a good option if you prefer low motion blur to smoother  VRR frame pacing.

However, sub-1ms GtG pixel response times are excellent for motion blur reduction strobe backlight modes (for low MPRT numbers) because of the need to squeeze GtG pixel response times in the dark period between backlight flashes. So sub-1ms GtG and sub-1ms MPRT are extremely welcome at Blur Busters!

Welcome Blur Busters readers to our VR State of the Union, 2018 edition!

My name is Bela, I’m a former AAA game developer working on virtual reality graphics and display R&D, and have been in collaboration with Blur Busters for a year now. So, welcome.

While Blur Busters mainly writes about high-Hz gaming monitors, VR headsets are also high-Hz. Some VR headset makers have been influenced by Blur Busters research in low-persistence, including Chief Blur Buster’s contributions to the Kickstarter Rift and early low-persistence research (they were beta testers of TestUFO six months before TestUFO.com launched to public!)

In this post, I’ll be going through a list of what I consider to be notable developments in VR land for the 2018 calendar year, based on my experience with various PC and mobile headsets, both as a VR rendering programmer and a VR gaming and simulation enthusiast.

2018 Virtual Reality Headset Sales

One of the big questions about the status of the VR industry in 2018 is simply: “is VR dying?”

According to SteamVR stats, no:

Note: The gap in the chart above is a data error by Valve, but the trend is clear.   

Impartial observers and industry analysts also don’t think so, backed by global market research data.

Smartphone VR add-ons like Samsung GearVR and Google Daydream, or the myriad cheap clones out there, are definitely in decline, dropping by more than half since 2017 (1 million to 400k shipped).

Tethered VR headsets sales have also declined by 37%, despite price rebates to Sony PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Each one of these companies sold around 100,000 headsets in 2018.

However, a bright spot in sales is coming from Standalone VR headsets, like Oculus Go (3DOF) and Xiaomi Mi VR, which grew over 400% in the same period with over 200,000 units sold.

Oculus Quest, coming out early 2019, will provide inside-out tracking and six degrees of freedom for both headset and controllers, to capitalize on these trends.

Sadly, there is no way to directly render graphics for these standalone headsets via the new RTX graphics cards from NVIDIA, which was a major release for 2018. This is besides software-based mirroring solutions which can add latency. I will be testing various hardware and software solutions in 2019 for performance and lag. It’s time to cut that wire!

Contrary to this slide, I believe that the market segmentation between standalone and tethered VR HMDs will vanish in the coming year or two.

The newest 802.11ay WiGig routers and adapters should be arriving in 2019 and can theoretically stream up to 100 gigabits per second (gbps), sufficient enough to handle the upcoming HDMI 2.1’s raw, wired-only 48 Gbps peak bandwidth before compression.

There are other solutions available now such as the wireless module from TPCast for Vive and Vive Pro, and Oculus Rift, although it’s not perfect and costs a whopping $319 USD too! A bit too rich for my blood.

Wireless / untethered helps with popular athletic VR games like Beat Saber, filling the role of “killer VR app”, with numerous Twitch streams devoted to showing off ninja-like reflexes with light sabers. I’ve played this game quite a bit this year, and especially with custom songs mods on the PC version, it’s a definite buy. Also helps work off some holiday calories!

New PC VR Headsets

My personal interest in VR is in the high-end, so from my perspective, that means PC-driven using a beefy system which I’ve upgraded to the RTX 2080 Ti.

With my Oculus Rift, my top problem areas to solve are, in order of importance:

• The wire, get rid of it! Then I won’t trip on it, or worry about doing that, when dodging and slashing enemies in Skyrim VR or chopping boxes in Beat Saber. Even when playing a racing game sitting down it bugs me.
• Software support. Not enough new games! The beautiful Forza Horizon 4, one of the most stunning looking racing games ever, doesn’t support VR at all. For shame! Get on that, Microsoft! Hopefully a hack will come out, although the use of the Windows Universal platform will make hacking in VR support more challenging than a traditional Desktop game.
• I’ve coded on the StarVR with its 210-degree FOV and even at 60hz the immersion was amazing.
• Resolution and SDE. Yes, I put this lower priority than the annoying wire. If only people would realize that standalone VR’s success is at least partially due to the lack of a wire, not merely the cost savings of not needing a PC. The Oculus Quest will have the rendering power of an Xbox 360, which can be reproduced in a PC quite cheaply.
• Lens glare. Very annoying.
• Sensor install pain. This is solved by inside-out tracking but that suffers from occlusion issues, so it’s not a perfect fix. I consider removing external tracking sensors low-priority, since you just have to install sensors once and that’s it. I don’t see the need to bring your VR headset outside of the house either, so mobile is rather pointless (to me). The whole point of VR is that you never have to leave your home again, right? Mom, meatloaf!

2018 has seen gifted us with HTC Vive Pro and Samsung Odyssey+ come out, both offering 1440 x 1600 resolution per eye at 90hz on low-persistence OLED screens, and are significantly clearer than the first-gen HMDs.

While the Vive Pro is the only one with a robust, first-party wireless module, it’s quite expensive at over $1000 USD with all the bells and whistles, while the Odyssey+ has the industry-best anti-screen-door-effect (SDE) filter which apparently blurs the OLED sub-pixels together. It also has good lenses which provide superior anti-God-ray glare reduction. It is substantially cheaper than the HTC Vive Pro, at only $500 USD retail, and doesn’t require any additional tracking boxes to install and set up around the room. I consider it a good purchase option, now if only someone would make a wireless adapter for it! Or one that works with any VR headset using HDMI or Displayport and USB connectors.

PIMAX: The Dark Horse in VR

Pushing the envelope for resolution and FOV, PIMAX is probably the most notable and successful Kickstarter VR campaigns since the Oculus Rift. I recommend watching this interesting interview with its founder, Xunshu, by prolific VR reviewer / industry mascot Sebastian Ang over at Mixed Reality TV.

PIMAX offers an amazing 200-degree field of view (FOV), and currently offers two models, the 5K Plus ($699 USD) and the 8K ($899 USD).

Both employ two custom LCD panels each, with low-persistence. The 5K+ has 2560×1440 resolution per eye at 90 Hz refresh rate, and the 8K (which is really 4K x 2, not real 8K) has 3840×2160 per eye at 80 Hz.

The DP 1.4 interface bandwidth cannot deliver that many pixels raw, so it’s upscaled in the display in the 8K model. According to Sebastian Ang, the 5K+ looks better for some content, and is the better buy since it offers 1:1 mapping and higher refresh rate too. I trust his judgment!

If I buy an “8K” headset, you can bet your bottom dollar that I don’t want it to be hampered by the choice of an inadequate connector like DisplayPort 1.4. An improved 8K+ will come out later and offer native “8K” resolution, using 1:1 mapping.

Ordering the PIMAX now will have it ship by Feb 21, 2019.

It should be noted that the PIMAX headsets use the SteamVR Tracking system so that is an additional expense ($300 USD), but provide terrific low-latency tracking, free of occlusion issues that has been affecting some camera-based inside-out tracking systems.

That’s it for now, so have a happy new year. There will be some exciting monitor & VR news from CES 2019 starting January 8th. See you soon!

Happy New Year everyone!

For our first post of 2019, we’re reporting on an exciting new monitor announcement by LG, which has, to my mind, the ideal resolution for watching letterbox CinemaScope movies or playing PC games in Ultra-Wide 21:9 on it.

Expected to be demoed at CES 2019, the new LG 38GL950G-G is a 38-inch monstrosity that offers 3840×1600 at a whopping 175 Hz! The G represents the G-SYNC model, so we expect a FreeSync 2 version as well.

Now, for 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160 normally DisplayPort 1.4 bandwidth for HDR10 tops out at 98 Hz without chroma subsampling (so in 4:4:4). The good news about offering 3840 x 1600 instead of 3840 x 2160 in a traditional 16:9 monitor, is that the interface bandwidth saved from superfluous vertical real estate can then be used for full HDR10 support at 4:4:4 chroma up to 132 Hz, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Even with an RTX 2080 Ti, it’s difficult to sustain FPS higher than 120fps at 4K-ish resolution in modern games, even if that is letterbox (less vertical pixels to render = more performance).

Another new LG monitor in the same line to be shown at CES is a 27-inch 1440p named 27GL850G-B, again with G-Sync and this time with 160 Hz max refresh rate.

While we previously reported on similar 34-inch G-Sync and FreeSync LG monitors here, we wanted to give special thanks to forum poster Luckbad for making us aware of these newer ones. Keep up the good work!

I am personally really interested in this exact resolution for my next monitor purchase so I’ll be keeping a close eye on these developments. 2019 is going to be an exciting year for monitors, that’s for sure! The 1600 vertical resolution is a welcome development for those of us who want to move on from 1440 without dropping our pixels-per-inch (PPI) too much with a larger screen such as this one.

No mention of HDR peak nits is offered here yet, as details are sparse, but LG is surely pushing the limits of their IPS tech and we can only encourage them to continue doing so. We’ll surely have more to report  on during or after CES.

As soon as these are available online, they will be added to List of Ultrawide Gaming Monitors.

Just prior to the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) beginning next week, LG has announced that its newest line of OLED and LCD TVs will deliver True 4K (UHD) at 120 Hz refresh rate and VRR via HDMI 2.1 input ability. These chips are 48 gbps-capable and custom-built by Synopsis, allowing LG to beat others to market. Bravo! This is why competition is great.

This includes FreeSync 2, thankfully, the open standards-based variable refresh rate technology (VRR) for gaming, which will benefit smoothness tremendously as PCs, and consoles especially, struggle to maintain high FPS at 4K resolution. This would be a first for OLED.

Automatic low-latency mode is also present (ALLM) to reduce input lag to a very respectable 13ms without the need to futz around with the remote when you start up your games. These features only work on Xbox One, as yet, sadly. Sony, get your act in gear! It should be theoretically possible to add VRR to PS4 via firmware update, since FreeSync support has been built in to the GCN GPUs present even in the original PS4 model.

HDMI 2.1 also supports eARC so you can stream Dolby Atmos content directly to the TV and have it output only the audio signal back to your receiver or soundbar.

HDR performance should be stellar on their OLED models, Z9, W9, E9 and C3, thanks to amazing native contrast ratios with perfect blacks, while their LCD sets, the SM99 and SM8X should do well enough with higher peak nits.

The Z9 OLED line is available at 8K as well, up to a massive 88 inches, while the 8K SM99 LCD tops out at 75 inches. Home Theater projectors are perhaps not long for this world at the rate TVs are getting bigger, better, and cheaper every year.

The list of HDR formats supported are: HDR10 (though not HDR10+), Dolby Vision, Hybrid-Log Gamma (HLG), and Advanced HDR. I presume HDR10+ can be trivially added but LG chooses not to for commercial reasons, as HDR10+ seems to be a Samsung favorite. Dolby Vision’s dynamic metadata solution is superior anyway, frankly, although still a tad disappointing.

LG’s new embedded chips support High Frame Rate (HFR) video and a unique machine learning (ML) algorithm called ThinQ, used for various image-quality (and audio) enhancements. This use of AI is a trend begun last year with Samsung’s AI-upscaling tech in their 8K TVs, which is practically necessary to take advantage of 8K due to lack of native content for it, so we look forward to first-hand impressions from Mark on the show floor next week.

These TVs also support black frame insertion in 4ms persistence increments, bringing a Clear Motion Ratio equivalent of 240Hz for 120fps material.

Further discussion can be found here at Ars Technica, and AVS Forum, including comments on potential OLED low-persistence modes by our very own Chief Blur Buster, Mark Rejhon.

2019 is turning out to be a great year to finally splurge on that 4K 120 Hz OLED TV! Now, if I could only get my GeForce RTX 2080 to work on an VRR OLED… Wink, Wink.

In a Hertz head-turner, HP announced plans to release the OMEN 15 — the first 240Hz screen on a laptop computer in July 2019.

Having cake and eating it too, it also has a backlit keyboard with custom RGB backlit zones, it includes an NVIDIA next-gen graphics card, 11ax WiFi or Gigabit WiFi option, 1080p 240Hz with a 4ms pixel response time. The 4ms is

We know mobile CPUs can be more limiting. On the other hand, this is one heck of a powerful laptop:

This laptop with the ability to cool down more than 100 watts — has the real horsepower to push 240 frames per second in CS:GO. The game is able to run in excess of 300 frames per second on this laptop — making perfect use of 240Hz! Although an older game, CS:GO is still extremely popular.

In addition, the existence of mobile ultra-high-refresh rate screens also makes browser scrolling and window dragging much smoother so there is a significant ergonomic benefit to ultra high refresh rates.

Especially since 240Hz has about one-quarter the LCD motion blur as 60Hz for many Windows operations, which is an excellent boon for motion blur haters even without yet starting a game. Not everyone is sensitive to motion blur, but it can be a significant source of eyestrain for some motion-blur-sensitive people.

We are excited to see 240Hz arriving in mobile devices along the journey to future higher-Hz displays.

This morning’s sizzling hot news from CES 2019 comes from NVIDIA, as they have announced a new driver that will enable FreeSync variable-refresh rate (VRR) compatibility with their GPUs!

Finally!

For many, the G-SYNC premium – over 200$ USD in some cases — often paid for very high quality, well-tuned overdrive, and the addition of ULMB. However with OLED FreeSync, and a major glut of FreeSync displays on the market, as well as improved FreeSync 2 displays, the carrot is getting too delicious for NVIDIA.

This bodes well for those of us who are looking forward to new 4K 120 Hz OLED TVs with VRR tech in them but which don’t support G-SYNC and now, likely never will.

NVIDIA has extended a “G-SYNC branding” to be a sort of a validation of various monitors’ VRR suitability.

Essentially, it appears NVIDIA becomes a second much-more-rigorous certification facility for FreeSync, where NVIDIA tests monitors to see if it’s good quality enough to be certified “G-SYNC Compatible”.

Many, if not most, cheaper FreeSync monitors simply will not pass the test to deliver a good enough VRR experience to get “G-SYNC – Compatible” status, which is the lowest tier. Presumably, mere mortals of wimpy “FreeSync 48Hz-60Hz” ranges, need not apply.

Above that level, is G-SYNC (traditional) and G-SYNC ULTIMATE, which includes HDR 1000 nits rating.

The basic level of “Validated Experience” tests for flicker, blanking, and other artifacts, while “Certified” checks image quality.

Here is the list of currently tested and approved FreeSync monitors to use on your NVIDIA GPU:

These monitors are now considered “G-SYNC Compatible”

• Acer XFA240
• Acer XZ321Q
• ASUS MG278Q
• ASUS ROG Strix XG258Q
• Acer Predator XG270HU
• Agon AG241QC4
• ASUS ROG Strix XG248Q
• ASUS VG278Q
• Acer XV273K
• AOC G2590FX
• ASUS ROG VG258Q
• BenQ ZOWIE XL2740

To find out more, read these excellent breakdowns from Anandtech and PC Gamer.

The new driver supporting FreeSync will be released on January 15th, 2019.

At CES 2019, Lenovo pushes further into bleeding edge gaming monitor setups with their brand new Legion Y44w and Y27gq monitors.

A head turner is that one of the two is a 1440p monitor running at 240Hz

Here is a quick overview of the two monitors for easy reading:

Lenovo Legion Y44w — Ultrawide 144 Hz Gaming Monitor

• Massive 43.4 inch ultrawide monitor
• 3840×1200 panel with 32:10
• HDR 400 Certified
• 99% gamut of sRGB, BT.709, DCI-P3

Lenovo Legion Y44w — 240 Hz 1440p Gaming Monitor

• 240 Hertz at 2560×1440 resolution!
• G-SYNC Certified
• 0.5ms response time

Now, now, what a beauty of combining 1440p and 240Hz, plus useful sub-1ms pixel response!

Going faster than 1ms is still useful

At Blur Busters, we are big believers at shattering the 1ms GtG / 1ms MPRT barriers (We have an upcoming article why this sub-1ms still has human-visible improvements). GtG and MPRT are two totally different methods of measuring response time, and both are useful numbers for different reasons.

Although pixel response speed can be nebulous and can be exaggerated by many manufacturers, there is still a huge usefulness to keeping speeding up pixel response to reduce ghosting (at high-Hz), strobe crosstalk, and other factors.

As we reach 240Hz and 480Hz, even 1ms becomes a large fraction of a refresh cycle and GtG response problems become human-visible again when pixel response is a large percentage of a refresh cycle.

NVIDIA’s second big CES 2019 news is that their new budget RTX model, the RTX 2060, is coming out on January 15th at a very affordable 349$ USD. Hurrah, RTX for the masses, finally.

This mid-range card,  clocked at 1680 MHz, has a respectable 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM and should be able to maintain 60 FPS in Battlefield V at 1440p, according to NVIDIA’s jacket-wearing CEO, Jensen Huang.

On average, RTX 2060 is expected to outperform the previous-gen Pascal GTX 1060 by up to a factor of two and also beats the GTX 1070 Ti according to PC Gamer and is close to GTX 1080 in terms of performance, especially when overclocked. Not bad at all!

Of course, the big draw to these cards is the new ray tracing functionality, which only Turing GPUs offer leaving Pascal in the dust, and this is without without costing any traditional rasterization performance when enabled either, due to exploiting dedicated RT Cores for this end. Additionally, machine learning-based AA called DLSS offers a big image quality upgrade and boosts performance at the same time. What’s not to like?

Depending on which card is purchased, you either get a choice between two RTX-enabled games, or both of them, in the bundle: Battlefield V and/or the as-yet-unreleased Anthem:

In all the fun of Area 51 puns, both Blur Busters UFO logo and Dell’s Alienware is inspired by the mystique of the famous Roswell UFO.

At CES 2019 in Las Vegas, where Alienware has an almost “Area 51 secret” style exhibit location at The Venetian hotel, hidden far away from the main convention exhibit hall in another galaxy…

4K 120Hz FreeSync Beauty In New Alienware OLED

I visited Dell Alienware and their quite dazzling new equipment including their 4K 120Hz variable refresh rate OLED – a full 55 inches of beauty.

They confirmed it will support VRR, so we now have multiple OLEDs that are FreeSync compatible! (NVIDIA may soon be kidnapped to Area 51 to persuade them to declare them “G-SYNC Compatible” or else).

As we already know, OLED is capable of extremely deep blacks with really great color quality – it is totally a dream for haters of TN LCDs. Have cake and eat it too, in fast pixel response AND great colors. Hopefully it will also include black frame insertion to eliminate OLED motion blur.

240 Hz Laptop Is Here Too!

There were sweet gaming laptops on display too as well, including the DELL G17 laptop, a 15″ 144Hz laptop that appeared to have excellent color quality.

And, a surprise leaped out, a 240Hz DELL Alienware m15 gaming laptop, beckoned with more Hertz than nearly all laptop mortals in existence. Real Hertz, baby!

In addition to the Alienware laptops, was a nice 4K miniature powerhorse I’d love to edit my Blur Busters posts on, but they wouldn’t let me abduct that laptop (just kidding, Dell).

We are very excited about the big blast of Alienware products in the “Better Than 60Hz” arena. More UFO technology abounds from Area 51.

To Be Continued…

Some exciting news for AMD and Team Red fans, the new Radeon VII, based on Vega 7nm architecture has been announced at CES 2019.

It will be available to buy on February 7, 2019 and its retail price is 699$ USD.

Here’s the official launch video:

AMD’s Lisa Su is demoing the card at CES now with EA’s Battlefield V and Ubisoft’s The Division 2, which are running “smoothly” according to PC Gamer, but no independently measured performance data is available so far.

Most expect this 7nm GPU to offer competitive performance to Nvidia’s RTX 2080. We’ll see!

Radeon VII’s major specs are as follows:

• 16GB HBM2 memory with 1TB/sec bandwidth, which means a game can read the entire 16GB every single frame at 60 Hz. That’s twice that offered by GDDR6 in the RTX 2080.
• 60 Compute Units (CUs)
• 1450 Mhz base clock, 1750 Mhz boost
• 300 Watt TDP (keep this in mind when picking a power supply)
• 3840 Cores
• 4096-bit memory interface

No official news yet on VirtualLink (USB-C) or HDMI 2.1 connectors, but we’ll keep you informed as time comes up.

Congratulations to AMD for bringing us this exciting new card. No matter which brand GPU one prefers, competition is great and pushes innovation forward.

At CES 2019, Samsung has quite a substantially large booth, mainly showing off their many high-end television sets including 120Hz-capable 4K televisions.

An impressive ultrawide, the Samsung CRG9 ultrawide gaming monitor beckoned gaming section of Samsung’s Samsung’s booth, boasting 120Hz at an incredible 5120×1440 resolution.

The specifications of this huge Samsung CRG9 gaming display:

• 49″ VA panel
• 5120×1440 at 120Hz
• Curved 1800R at 32:9 Aspect Ratio
• FreeSync 2 with DisplayHDR 1000
• Quantum Dot backlight with DCI 95% Coverage

And… The Wall: Biggest Non-Projector 120Hz Display At 120Hz?

In addition, while browsing Samsung’s booth, I took a look at The Wall, a massive MicroLED display being shown at CES 2019.

It appeared to be showing off better-than-4K resolution at a 120Hz refresh rate. I witnessed some clips from a Forza-style racing game, which appeared have played much more smoothly than 60 frames per second.

Even though the refresh rate was not listed, I immediately recognized it as the motion fluidity of 120Hz. This makes it one of the largest 120Hz displays Blur Busters has ever seen!

More from CES 2019 to come.

At CES 2019, my exploration of new monitor technologies continued, I was greeted by the amazing sight of over a hundred curved OLED screens forming a curved video wall entrance, as I entered LG’s impressive huge booth.

This year, LG was primarily showcasing their impressive OLED developments. Their 2019 OLED 4K displays now includes native 60Hz and 120Hz 4K modes that includes black frame insertion of as low as 1/240sec persistence (4.2ms).

In a corner, was their UltraGear gaming monitors, the “Nano IPS” G-SYNC monitors caught our attention.

We know that Nano IPS has much faster pixel response.

While the exact pixel response is currently unspecified, LG has confirmed that they are currently work towards getting much closer to a 1ms pixel response time instead of the traditional 5ms speed found for IPS. If they succeed, this will bring IPS into the ballpark of current TN panels, while having the excellent color quality and viewing angles of IPS!

Here are the specifications of the displays:

LG UltraGear 27GL850G Gaming Monitor:

• Nano IPS display (faster response than normal IPS)
• 27″ QHD
• 2560×1440
• 144Hz Refresh Rate with G-SYNC
• 98% color gamut of DCI-P3
• Sphere Lighting 2.0 – automatic RGB ambient light similiar to “Ambilight”

LG UltraGear 38GL950G Gaming Monitor

• 37.5″ Ultrawide
• 3840×1600 Resolution
• 144Hz Refresh Rate with G-SYNC
• Curved Nano IPS Display
• 98% Color Gamut of DCI-P3
• Sphere Lighting 2.0 — RGB ambient light similiar to Ambilight

The menus on these monitors looked really kick-ass, very easy to read, with excellent high contrast ratio, and extremely easy to navigate (single joystick on the bottom edge).

The design of the menus in this monitor appears to be top-notch thought, as we too often encounter monitors whose menu designs are left to firmware engineers who are not remotely even graphics artists.

Being a beta monitor, the NVIDIA ULMB option is not yet visible, and we’re looking forward to LG succeeding in making Nano IPS pixel response sufficiently fast-response enough to gain the optional ULMB feature that is much-loved by some Blur Busters readers.

The colors were brilliant and dazzling, and the viewing angles were excellent despite being practically ghost-free — the pixel response reminded me more of TN-speed than IPS-speed.

These are quite exciting gaming display technologies, we welcome fast-pixel IPS overlords, to gain the ability to have cake and eat it too.

New 4K 120Hz OLED and 8K OLED Televisions For 2019

I had the opportunity to see LG 4K and 8K OLED television displays, which were absolutely brilliantly colorful, with deep blacks, and high refresh rate capability now standard in 2019 LG OLEDs.

The new 2019 LG 4K OLEDs that contain a HDMI 2.1 port, all now can do 120Hz refresh rate at their full 4K resolution.

These televisions are also capable of black frame insertion to reduce motion blur. 50% BFI is available at 120Hz, while 25% / 50% / 75% BFI is available at 60Hz.

Kudos to LG for introducing a wide variety of impressive display technologies at CES 2019!

With the huge boom of 8K displays at CES 2019, some engineers now have access to 8K native-120Hz panels for testing, and some are now being forced to use Linux to do initial >512Hz tests.

• For the 512Hz limitation, this is a confirmed Microsoft Windows limitation.
• For the 8K 120Hz limitation, this may be caused by other limitation such as graphics drivers.

There has been many public announcements of 120Hz-capable 8K panels, including AUO 85″ 8K 120Hz panel, and even a few years ago, Japan Display prototyped an 8K 120Hz OLED.

Windows 512 Hz Limitation

Several display engineers, including Zis behind the 480Hz experimental display, as well as other display engineers, have complained about our inability to push displays with Windows.

NVIDIA has tested a 1700Hz prototype display, and ViewPixx sells a 1440Hz DLP projector, which you can read more here. Blur Busters is increasingly internally testing ultra high refresh rate displays.

There Are Two Hardcoded Display Limits in Windows 10

• Arbitrary Pixel Clock hard-coded limit 
• Arbitrary Refresh Rate hard-coded limit of 512 Hertz
  

Perhaps the pixel clock limitation is based on the maximum value of a 32-bit integer (2,147,43,647 for signed integers and 4,294,967,295 for unsigned integers). This is still yet to be confirmed. If so, then time to use 64-bit integers for pixel clock, baby!

Situations Using Multiple Cables To Same Single Display

Display engineers have often been able to use multiple parallel video cables to the same single display to overcome limitations.

Multiple cables were done to the world’s first 4K monitors from nearly twenty years ago, the IBM T221 (Wikipedia). Also, Zisworks did 4K 120Hz by using two DisplayPort cables.

There may be hard-coded limits that Microsoft has built-in to their display subsystem. The Hertz equivalent of “640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone”.

This is the error message you get, even when an experimental display is able to support 8K 120Hz via multiple cables connected to it. This may be a driver problem.

While 640 Kilobytes Ought To Be Enough, 1000Hz Benefits Is Actually Human-Visible

To explain to surprised software developers (I’m one too!) — here is some educational reading about how 500Hz and 1000Hz refresh rates can become human-visible, read the following articles:

• Blur Busters 480Hz Tests
• Blur Busters Law And The Amazing Journey To Future 1000Hz Displays

Here is some photos of only one of the many human-visible benefits that we have observed in 1000Hz experiments.

During 1000Hz, it shows as even tighter mouse arrow spacings. Also, this is not the only benefit of using a 1000Hz display refresh rate. You can read more here.

We hope that an upcoming Windows 10 Update will remove both hardcoded values, including both the Pixel Clock limit, and the Refresh Rate limit of 512 Hz.

EDIT: Since this article was published, a source has reported that they were able to get 8K 120Hz functioning through various engineering hacks, as long as they were using the latest version of Windows. Three sources, have however confirmed the 512 Hz limit is being enforced by Microsoft Windows.

High Speed Video Makes Display Refresh Behaviour Easy To Understand

Blur Busters released the high speed video of motion blur reduction in year 2012, and we were the world’s first website to measure the input lag of G-SYNC via high speed camera in 2014.

New TestUFO Test For High Speed Cameras

We now have a new TestUFO test, called TestUFO Scan-Out which automatically rotates between 4 different brightly colored images every refresh cycles. This test pattern is intentionally extremely flickery, for the purpose of maximizing contrast between refresh cycles during TestUFO motion tests.

High Speed Video Of 60Hz IPS Desktop Monitor

The screen refreshes top-to-bottom, with a fuzzy zone wiping down the screen.  The fuzzy zone is the LCD pixel response lagging behind (GtG fade zone). The fuzzy zone appears to about one-quarter the height of the screen, which is what is expected for GtG pixel response (5ms) approximately 1/4th of a refresh cycle (16.7ms for 60Hz).

High Speed Video Of 60Hz MacBook Laptop

The refreshing behaviour is very similar to a typical laptop, top-to-bottom, with a fuzzy zone representing the LCD pixel response.

High Speed Video Of 60Hz iPad Mini 4

Here’s where this diverges interestingly; this iPad scans from top-to-bottom in portrait mode. When filmed in landscape mode, this becomes a sideways scan effect:

Not All Pixels On Displays Refresh Simultaneously

As seen in these high speed videos, displays often refresh sequentially, in a top-to-bottom fashion.

There can be a latency differential for top edge and bottom edge, which can get rather significant in some sync modes (VSYNC ON) at lower refresh rates. The refreshing sequence is illustrated temporally in this scan graph:

It is worth noting that refresh cycles cannot be transmitted instantly all at once on a cable.

Cable Scan-Out Versus Display Panel Scan-Out

Pixels are transmitted one pixel row at a time over a cable. This is because GPUs have to serialize two-dimensional refresh cycles over a one-dimensional cable. Pixels are output one pixel at a time, left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

Panel refreshing may be a different pattern, different direction, or different velocity, and may be totally different (e.g. DLP) from the cable sequence. However, most high end eSports gaming monitors are now able to real-time synchronize panel refresh to cable delivery sequence with only line buffer processing rather than full frame buffer processing. This is much much like an old CRT tube, except done flickerfree in a sample-and-hold fashion, and this reduces input lag to the absolute minimum possible.

This is classic raster-based scanning on the cable, the refresh cycle direction of top-to-bottom has remained identical for nearly 100 years all the way from 1930s television broadcasts through 2020s DisplayPort and HDMI 2.1 cables, even with variable refresh rates!

Sub-Refresh-Cycle Latencies Are Possible With VSYNC OFF

During ultra-high-framerate situations using VSYNC OFF, latencies of less than a refresh cycle are possible even for screen bottom edge. Especially on display panels that has real time sync to cable scan-out.

Running at a frame rate three times the refresh rate, will result in 3 tearlines per refresh cycle, although some tearlines may end up hidden in the interval (VBI) between refresh cycles.

Each frame slice is 1/3rd refresh cycle latency, and the updated frame (slice) is metaphorically spliced in realtime at the display output’s current scan-out position.

There are advantages of framerates above refresh rates including lower input lag — which can end up being less than a refresh cycle even for the screen bottom edge. This is why paid professional eSports players often prefer VSYNC OFF.

Variable Refresh Rate Uses Variable-Length Intervals Between Refresh Cycles

Variable refresh rate (VRR) actually varies the size of the vertical blanking interval (the pause between refresh cycles) in order to temporally space-apart refresh cycles.

The top-to-bottom raster scan still remains, however the intervals between refreshes can vary instead of being a fixed interval. Here is the scan diagram of 100fps at 144Hz:

In this situation, the monitor actually waits for the computer to begin transmitting the new refresh cycle. When a video game is finished rendering a new frame, it immediately begins transmitting instead of waiting for the next fixed refresh interval.

Another huge benefit of variable refresh rate is very low scan-out lag. A 240Hz G-SYNC monitor can display a 30Hz refresh cycle in 1/240sec, refreshed near real-time off the video cable. This is a “Quick Frame Transport” (QFT) behavior of VRR.

Conclusion

Display scan-out research has become much easier with the advent of inexpensive high speed cameras.  Reviewers and manufacturers are now strongly encouraged to purchase high speed cameras to analyze scan-out latency of their displays, and troubleshoot problems caused by:

• Confirming Whether Display Scan-Out Is In Sync With Cable Scan-Out
• Confirming Existence Of Sub-Refresh Latencies For Screen Bottom
  This is possible with VSYNC OFF at frame rates significantly exceeding refresh rates.
• Abnormally high latency of lower refresh rates than higher refresh rates.
  Cause: Display buffering to scan-convert a slow-scanning 60Hz signal to a fast-scanning 240Hz panel. 
• Benchmarking Strobe Backlight Quality & Strobe Crosstalk

Inexpensive High-Def 1000fps Cameras

There are now inexpensive high definition Super Slow Motion Cameras capable of 1000fps HD that works excellently for display scan behavior research with the new TestUFO Scanout Test.

• Samsung Galaxy S9 Smartphone – 960fps
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ Smartphone – 960fps
• Sony Xperia XZ Premium Smartphone  – 960fps
• Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium Smartphone  – 960fps
• Sony DSCRX0 Action Camera – 960fps, 1000fps

Some of these only records 1000fps for only a fraction of a second, however this is plenty for refresh behavior analysis and debugging latency engineering problems in gaming monitors.

For the first time ever in Blur Busters history – the “FreeSync” and “G-SYNC” tags are labelled onto the same graphics driver!

The brand new NVIDIA driver that provides G-SYNC compatibility to FreeSync monitors has now been released.

You can download the new 417.71 drivers within your GeForce Experience that you already have installed. If you don’t have GeForce Experience, go download it via NVIDIA’s website.

Once installed,

1. Connect monitor via DisplayPort cable.
2. Enable FreeSync in your monitor menus.
3. Enable “G-SYNC Compatible” via NVIDIA Control Panel.

Now you’re playing variable refresh rate on a GeForce graphics card onto a FreeSync monitor!

As long as the panel is adaptive sync compatible over the DisplayPort cable, it should now work. NVIDIA has found only 12 monitors as being high quality to be considered G-SYNC compatible. However, the good news is the driver is not locked to those monitors!

Any FreeSync Monitor Should Work Via DisplayPort

We are pleased to report that this driver appears unlocked for any FreeSync monitor connected via a DisplayPort connection. This bodes well for upcoming VRR 4K OLED televisions!

You can test this driver on most FreeSync monitors. However, some caveats apply.

Quality may be lower than native G-SYNC. Unlisted and uncertified monitors may not generate as good quality an experience as full G-SYNC, especially those with narrow FreeSync ranges (skimpy 40Hz-60Hz ranges) which will look worse than a wide range of variable refresh rate (generous 48Hz-240Hz ranges). Low frame rate compensation may be missing. Overdrive ghosting can vary much more on lower-quality adaptive sync monitors, ULMB motion blur reduction features may not be available, and the eye candy of G-SYNC HDR may not be available.

The good news, is that as long as you’re using the NVIDIA recommended FreeSync monitors, the experience is great enough to be considered “G-SYNC Compatible” by NVIDIA.

Virtual reality is still in its infancy and many Blur Busters readers play FPS games on traditional desktop gaming monitors, however we also monitor VR developments. VR technologies also have important applications for non-VR “Better Than 60Hz” developments, too!

At CES 2019, I had the opportunity to browse the multiple headsets and then try them all on again this year. You may have seen our 2018 VR Rollup article, but it was time to get our (virtual) hands dirty and try all the headsets on for real!

Oculus Rift

The torchbearer of the resurrection of modern VR, is the Oculus Rift VR headset. It set the benchmark on pleasant low-persistence virtual reality. Technologically, the Oculus Rift is much closer to a Star Trek Holodeck than the experimental VR of the “Dactyl Nightmare” or “Nintendo Virtual Boy” era of 25 years ago (or even cheap Google Cardboard with an old stuttery smartphone).

While Oculus has the Oculus Quest standalone and also a rumored prototype in private room up the hotel tower, I tried on the Oculus Rift, which is the mainstream headset currently on the market.

Quick Impressions: Great OLED contrast tratio, best game library, best controllers, worst screendoor effect, reasonably affordable with recent price reductions

HTC Vive

The main competition of Oculus, they innovated by being the first to develop a very workable roomscale system with their HTC lighthouse sensors, to turn a whole room into a Holodeck. The competition had to catch up after that.

There were other pretty headsets on display, such as the Vive Cosmos (the next gen) and the Vive Pro Eye (the eye tracking headset), as well as Vive Focus (the standalone headset). I tried on the wireless Vive Pro, the best currently available for sale.

Quick Impressions: Much reduced screendoor effect, totally wireless freedom with lack of cable, innovator of good roomscale, expensive price to gain great upgrades

PIMAX

An unexpected kickstarter that came with 5K and 8K hype to eliminate the screendoor effect, has quickly risen from vaporware to real testable devices. It was finally time to try on a PIMAX headset for real!

The one I tried on was the 8K unit. Graphics are upscaled to 8K as no computer can render 8K at the VR-compatible framerates yet, but 8K (technically, 2 x 4K) means the screendoor effect is darn near virtually gone! Those PIMAX lenses were ginormous, the largest I have ever seen in a headset, they were needed for large FOV of approximately 200 degrees.

Quick impressions: Impressively nearly no screendoor effect, huge field of view, its low-persistence LCD had lack of motion blur, albiet poorer contrast with greyer blacks (expected of most LCD-based technologies).

Other Vendors

There were many other VR vendors, but alas, I was unable to reach all of them before CES 2019 closing. Innovations were being done by Qualcomm and other vendors.

Spinoff of VR Technologies To Traditional Gaming

Innovations in VR such as improved framepacing and consistent high framerate algorithms have filtered down from VR software developers. VR has a mandatory requirement of frame rates locked to refresh rates, to prevent nausea and headaches.

Some of these have innovations have reached traditional non-VR games such as Forza racing games that now has the ability to automatically adjust detail level in realtime to keep frame rates matching refresh rate.

Software developers trained in virtual reality frame pacing are highly respected by Blur Busters in improving the motion clarity of traditional video games.  In addition, I, as Chief Blur Buster, own a roomscale Oculus Rift too!

Sub-millisecond-accuracy framepacing and ultra-low-latency refreshrate-locked framerates are extremely useful in the emergence of future 480Hz+ gaming monitors and 2000Hz+ gaming mice of the 2020s decade and beyond.  A millisecond is actually 50% of a 480Hz refresh cycle, and there are still human visible differences between 240Hz versus 480Hz versus 1000Hz. The refresh rate race will continue now that the resolution race is mostly maxed-out. At these refresh rates, millisecond imperfections starts to become massively amplified.

Bring on the VR progress, into traditional video game programming!

At CES 2019, ASUS announced the XG438Q, a television-sized version of a 4K FreeSync monitor at a high rerfresh rate. Here are the specifications:

• 43″
• 120Hz at 3840×2160
• VA panel
• FreeSync 2 HDR
• HDR certified to DisplayHDR 600

In addition, ASUS also announced a family of other gaming monitors at CES 2019, the XG32VQR and XG49VQ:

ASUS ROG STRIX XG32VQR Specs

• 31.5″
• 144Hz at 2560×1440
• FreeSync 2 HDR
• HDR certified to DisplayHDR 400

ASUS ROG STRIX XG49VQ Specs

• 49″ curved ultrawide 21:9
• 144Hz at 3840×1080
• FreeSync 2 HDR
• HDR certified to DisplayHDR 600

We are excited to see more options in high-Hz 4K monitors arriving on the market.