Speaking of V-Sync, Nvidia’s recently announced G-Sync technology sounds like a really great idea, if such a tech does ever get standardised and become widely adopted, should be pretty nice for smooth looking games and solve the age old V-Sync/tearing problems properly.
All the advantages of V-sync without all the disadvantages of V-sync? Oh, yes.
Yeah but it would take a loooooooooooong time for wide adoption.
That just sounds awesome, a supplementary GPU in the monitor? Unfortunately, it probably would be a while before its used widely, but it would be worth it to adopt the technology early. vSync is just nasty… This sounds like it solves all the problems. Guess I should switch over to nvidia now! I didn’t read the whole thing, so I don’t know if you would need a nvidia GPU to interface with it.
It sounds like most games don’t need to do anything special to support g-sync. You just need to purchase a monitor that supports it, then turn it on in your driver options. Of course, most people are still using shitty 60hz monitors, so it’s going to take a while for the concept of vsync to disappear…
As theagentd said, v-sync is designed to avoid “tearing” that may occur if the frame buffer is flipped precisely while the monitor is drawing the contents of the buffer on screen, leading to the effect that part of the screen shows the game view at t = n, and part at t = n + 1. This may cause some minor visual disturbances. V-sync avoids this by syncing the buffer fips with the monitor rendering cycles, as I understand it.
However, in practice v-sync usually means that the framerate will be effectively limited to the rate at which the monitor updates, which is usually 60 times per second. This means it’s an easy “hack” to limit the frame rate of your game. However, it’s much better to use a well-designed game loop to control your frame rate and rendering as, again, theagentd said ;D
G-sync sounds pretty awesome indeed. It’s not just for games, but also for movies etc, making every 24fps movie smoother. I would expect that to be clearly noticeable. I like this kind of tech much more than even-higher-HD or 3D video techs.
Edit: I’ve been bulshitting about movies, never mind that. Its mostly a real-time rendering tech.
First I’d heard of gsync; though it makes perfect sense in a post-crt world.
Shame nvidia have gone down a proprietary route; it’ll take ages(perhaps never) to become widespread without cooperation & collaboration from AMD & Intel.
hmm … that makes me think one answer to the OP’s problem with differing pixel jumps per frame (know exactly what you mean!) would be to incorporate some sort of motion blur, or other form of interpolation between frames. Mind you, doing that in Java2D :-\