Even if you have the biggest, baddest graphics card on the planet, your games still might
not look as crisp as you'd expect. But don't blame your GPU.
Blame your monitor. I'm talking about motion blur, that effect you see when the visuals on your screen get
smeared around so things look blurrier, ghosted.
Do note that this is completely unrelated to the motion blur setting you might find
in some of your favorite games, which adds an artificial cinematic blurring effect if
you quickly change the camera angle. Real motion blur has been the bane of gamers for a very long time.
Not only does it look unappealing, but in competitive gaming it can actually interfere
with your performance. But why exactly is motion blur still a problem, and how is NVIDIA's new ULMB2 trying to fix
it? Well, the main cause has to do with how most computer monitors are designed.
You'll often see a specification when you're monitor shopping called response time.
And simply put, this is how long it takes the pixels to change colors, usually measured
as how long it takes to go from one shade of gray to another.
On any display with a backlight, meaning just about anything that isn't an OLED, response
times are not instantaneous. It actually takes a few milliseconds for your monitor's pixels to execute a change,
which is long enough for gamers to perceive motion blur.
Because they're higher beings, they're better than most people. On these displays, the main way that you can fight motion blur is by enabling backlight
strobing, a feature that turns the backlight off for short periods of time, meaning the
screen is dark while the pixels are transitioning, reducing the amount of blur you can perceive.
Back in 2015, NVIDIA came out with their specific flavor of backlight strobing they called
ULMB. Unfortunately, because of the rather long pixel response times back then, the backlight
would have to be off for 75% of the time.
This meant the picture overall would often end up noticeably dim, reducing its appeal,
especially for competitive gamers. Not to mention, ULMB would actually have to slow down the screen's refresh rate in order
to give the pixels enough time to transition. However, NVIDIA has recently rolled out an improved version, uncreatively named, ULMB2.
But how exactly did they solve the issues that plagued the original?
Part of ULMB2's advantage is that it doesn't have to lower a panel's refresh rate like
its predecessor did. This improvement actually doesn't even come from NVIDIA at all.
Instead, it's simply due to the fact that generally, pixel response times are significantly
shorter today than they were back in 2015.
Wow. ULMB2 also improves upon basic backlight strobing by controlling pixels on a more granular level.
You see, when pixels refresh to put a new image on your screen, they're typically refreshed
from the top down. So when the backlight flashes, some of those pixels will be in a state of transition, leading
to a phenomenon called crosstalk. Meaning, part of the image will likely still have some blurring or ghosting.
But ULMB2 largely overcomes crosstalk by over-driving certain pixels with higher voltage, causing
them to change state more quickly than others.
Too much overdrive can lead to undesirable visual artifacts, but ULMB2 uses overdrive
in a controlled way to create a sweet spot where the number of pixels mid-transition
is at a minimum when the backlight turns on. This not only means less motion blur, but also a brighter image than the original ULMB
since the backlight is turned on for a greater proportion of the time.
Okay, but what's the catch? Well, you'll need a monitor that specifically supports ULMB2.
At the time of writing, there are only two monitors on the market that do, and they're
not exactly cheap, as their high refresh rates, G-sync displays aimed more at the competitive
and enthusiast crowd. The good news? Nothing's stopping you from just gaming on a $150 display if you don't mind a little
bit of ghosting. It's not nearly as bad as the kind you get on the dating apps anyway.
And thanks for not ghosting me and watching this whole video! Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, check out our other videos, comment
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