Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar is anti-blur monitor tech aimed squarely at your eyeball

Motion blur, when it’s not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by “the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen,” as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor’s backlight.

You can’t just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing “a novel algorithm” in “synergizing” its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting.

↫ Kevin Purdy for Ars Technica

Cool technology, of course, but also another attempt by Nvidia to put Nvidia-specific chips inside monitors to cash in on royalties and tie people to Nvidia GPUs. Their previous attempt – G-Sync – was eventually thwarted, but they’re clearly trying again.

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  1. 2024-01-10 11:26 am
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