I am recording now please go all right so the core thing about gsync uh that
they're touting here is the ability that lets you get away from completely
isochronous or fixed time slices for your games now time slices have been
with us for the 50 years since television when you've got you had to
refresh the screen in these continuous patterns because the from the phosphor
just decayed it went away with back lit LCD displays the light's continuous
there so there is no sensible reason why we have to be doing that and because we
are we get these artifacts of either tear or jutter so it's really good to
get away from that now if you try for a high frame rate like 60 frames per
second which I've been a big proponent of if you miss it hurts really bad you
you know you drop all the way down to 30 frames per second while with something
like g-sync if you if you take 17 milliseconds instead of 16 milliseconds
nobody can even tell it just comes out as a tiny delay on the frame and that's
a wonderful thing so that's one real Advantage if you're trying hard for a
frame rate it makes your inevitable Miss imperceptible if you're not even trying
if you're just making a game that's randomly running at whatever the hell frame rate it turns out it magically
works out on this if you're going between 20 and 80 frames per second like
you know a lot of games will if they're unconstrained there this makes that
beneficial it means that it's smooth at 20 but then at 80 it's silky and this is
a really great thing now the interesting
tension that we've got here is that I didn't really appreciate this a year ago
but the persistence on a display the fact that it is continuously illuminated
contributes to a lot of subtle blurring effects on the screen when you look at
like a text uh you know like a web page if you pan it across the screen smoothly
or if you scroll like an iPad or something even if it's scrolling at a
perfect 60 frames per second smoothness it's hard to read because it feels
blurred in the direction that it's moving and that is a consequence of the
persistence the fact that it's continuously illuminated the solution to
that is to only illuminate it very briefly now this happened automatically
for CRT displays as the Electron Beam scanned over you only had you know
micros seconds of Illumination from that before it went away and there's a
category of people that would talk about like sports broadcasting where they'd complain it's never been the same since
you got flat panels because everything is a little bit more smeared on the pans
I never really noticed that so much but in a head mounted display it is night
and day it is one of the more dramatic technology demos that you can do to have
a display that you can switch between low persistence and full persistence
it's a big deal now the interesting thing is in the last couple years
NVIDIA's had their light boost technology for the 3D uh Vision stuff
and you could put that in you could use that as a low persistence monitor people
wrote firmware hacks to be able to do this so if you made 120 HZ game and Doom
3 BFG was one of the few things that because it's old game and we paid a
little bit of attention you could run it at 120 frames per second locked and you
could put it into a mode like this and it was pretty awesome but no modern game
runs at 120 frames per second you know let alone stereo for a head mounted
display because right now people will just say uh I'm a 30 HZ game and why
bother and even if you try for 60 you know that's enough Blood Sweat and Tears
to get there pushing further Beyond his hard but g-sync makes it a smooth
Continuum so every bit that you do to help helps you know it is better to be
at 70 than to 6 then 60 it's better to be at 40 than 30 this is a good thing
and I think that this will be a path that can start bringing some games up
now we've got the other tension of like 4K displays it's like okay let's go back
down to 30 frames per second to do a 4K display but at least there's the option
of possibly pushing up because once you get over 90 95 Hertz ideally up to 120
or 144 some of these monitors will run at you can start doing this low
persistence stuff but the problem with this and this is an interesting tension
I if you do the low persistence and you vary your frame rate then it changes the
intensity of what you're looking at so what needs to happen is you need to vary
the length of the illumination based on how long the frame rate was Now g-sync
can do all of these things they actually they they didn't want us to really talk
about this aspect of g-sync because they thought it would confuse the you know uh
the people listening but I I actually think that's pretty important where it's
got the low persistence option right now it's binary you can go to 120 Hertz and
be low persistence or you can be at variable frame rate but there's no
reason why this can't be combined where you start adapting one towards the other
then you get this option where the best world the best case of this would be the
game is running if it's running at 20 30 frames per second it's full persistence
it's just variable but as the game creeps up and it gets over 90 frames per
second then it can start adapting the backl to it and that'd be great so you
might have a game where only in some simple scenes are you at low persistence
wonderfulness while in your mass outdoor exploding everything then it's falling
down it's full persistence but that would be great it's making things better
where they can be better and there's a lot of other uses for this type of thing
like I had mentioned Android specifically because I did complain that
you take the like the NVIDIA Shield where it's got should have plenty of
horsepower but if you play Sonic on it it drops frames every now and then and
that's not the fault of the GPU or the CPU it's the fault largely of the power
management and what happens on Android where they're they're constantly trying
to save power by adapting the core count and the frequencies on these things and
unfortunately what happens is they often pull the power down until you start
dropping frames which is exactly the wrong thing to do so we could fight that
by saying well we want a dedicated amount of core cores and frequency but
then you waste power where really the optimal thing would be let them manage
the power as they do now and use variable refresh technology to just mean
when you slightly Miss it's it's it will be imperceptible if you go to 17
milliseconds for your frame in instead of 15 there and that will be a great
thing but even NVIDIA's knows that even though they own that platform it's going
to be integrating with another display vendor pushing things through
integrating with more Android stack these are hard cross compan issues and
NVIDIA it's great that NVIDIA did this I've been harping on this for a number
of years but it took something a company like NVIDIA that can change gpus and
that can change the hardware that can write the driers for that can you know
leverage the display vendors to actually put something like this in it could have
happened five years ago it would have been good to happen 5 years ago but you
know it's finally happening now well that's fantastic thank you very
much I'm sure everyone appreciated you taking the time I would offer to shake
your hand and thank you but I'm pretty burdened here right now okay all right
we're going to go try to intercept Tim Sweeney
hey Tim can I borrow you for just a
couple minutes just to basically say hi to the viewers sure okay I am going to
have to okay this is very challenging okay but you can you kind of reach past
me here and do you see channel one where it's there's an A and an M yeah can you
switch that to a and then same with Channel
2 so there you guys have it Tim Sweeney touched my
camera um so we've got about 3,000 viewers on here right now that are that
are watching live so if uh you know what I guess probably the most appropriate
thing given that we're at NVIDIA's event is can you talk a little bit about g-sync and how important you think it is
oh sure um it is a really important piece of technology it enables a games
Runing at any frame rate to have the smoothness uh that you get from running
at a constant frame rate you know right now to achieve 60 frames a second
perfect smoothest um you have to make great sacrifices in the game um and if
you just go one frame below it to 59 and suddenly your gain's interrupted by
these massive stutters and the gsync tech uh really creates a Continuum um so
that whatever level of uh frames the game is outputting can be displayed
smoothly and without these crazy artifacts that you have in games
nowadays it means uh Gamers game
developers will be able to create really awesome levels of content and still
achieve the sort of smoothness uh that you get in games like Call of Duty for
example I mean one of the things that the average person I think really
doesn't understand is they'll they're quick to blame any kind of a frame rate
issue on well the game optimization isn't very good can you talk a little
bit about the Bal the delicate balancing act that you guys go through to deliver
both great level of detail and a smooth gaming
experience sure it's a constant trade-off for a game developer um you
know with Gears of War for example we aimed at uh creating the most impressive
visual experience we could while trying to hit 30 frames a second pretty
consistently um but uh you know once in a while
there's a moment when the game drops below that and it really impacts the
quality because you're not dropping to 29 or 28 frames a second you're
jittering back and forth between 20 and 30 and it's just a it's just really bad
this Tech makes it much easier to develop games that have a high level of smoothness and that's going to mean a
lot more games will be smooth in the future it's it's one of those kind of
magical technologies that you don't necessarily look at the screen and
recognize exactly what's going wrong it just looks wrong and it looks uh jittery
and unrealistic for uh reasons that are hard to identify but when you see it
working perfectly it's an entirely different experience so in your mind would we see
something akin to gsync on handhelds
televisions along with PC monitors and how far out do you see that in the
future I mean how much would you love to have this on the console we'd love to
have this everywhere um televisions projectors uh mobile LCD display plays
um it's going to be especially important for you know products like Oculus uh
where you want to have a very high and consistent frame rate uh for past
response time this technology it's starting like almost everything um it's
an innovation in the industry it's starting on high-end PC and it will work
its way throughout the rest of the industry over the coming
years all right well I don't want to take up too much of your time I know
that you're supposed to be up here for the panel but I appreciate you uh just
taking the time to say hi to the viewers and uh I I would Shake sh your hand but
um if nothing else I'm going to try we'll have like a photo op sort of there
like gster that's the best we were able to do thank you so much for taking the
time yeah so there you guys go have you
forgiven the enforcer now forcer is not a bad guy because he he he helped us
sync up with Tim Sweeney so there you go yeah that's what they call me now
there there's Tim over there actually he wandered away from us over
to the g-sync demo you can see he's got his face about 4 in
from the screen okay maybe we're not going to leave him alone just
yet oh okay just for fun we're going to
bother you again here you're you're playing around with the demo right now
correct yes yes this has three modes vsync no vsync and gsync um of course in
a video of this you are not going to see any of what I'm talking about um but the
difference in smoothness is really impressive with vsync you see uh
uh you don't see tearing artifacts but you do see an inconsistency with the
frame rate consistently you know jittering back and forth between one frame rate and another because of the
way that the frame rates are discretized well I never knew what was wrong vsync
always felt off to me I never liked it
well it's subtle so you turn off vsync and you have a different set of areas
which is that each scan line is independently experiencing its own um
discretization but now you're getting this tearing where uh half of the screen
is the previous frame and half of the screen is the next frame wherever
arbitrarily in time the they change head and then what you think it's always
flipping at the right time it's displaying frames at a consistent rate
and so you get a lack of jittering artifacts and look here the frame rate
is varying here in places it's dropping probably even below oh definitely around
30 frames a second uh but this smooth
dropping from 60 down to 30 is much much less disturbing than dropping frames one
at a time and what you're looking at right now looks like a very extreme
example it looks like the first looks like the first thing Tim did when he got
here was cranked the frame time minimums all the way down and the maximums all
the way up or was it already like that when you got here uh no I did this this
is really the worst case so when the de so the way the Demo's running here let
me show you this guys this is like a Mayhem and a multiplayer game where
they're enormous numbers of players just causing crazy spikes in frame time all
the time but here what you think you won't appreciate it in this video uh
because it's a video of a screen with a different display resolution and uh
sampling rate but it's just uh it is Flawless to the point where there's this
Sol text on the spinning pendulum and you can actually read it um which is
astonishing because if you go turn off bsync then it's tearing it makes it hard
it's distracting your eye away from it um it's a it's making a really big
quantitative difference very cool okay thank you we
really will we really will stop bothering you you know thank
you so guys I mean you would never really see okay so the way the demo set
up for minimum and maximum frame times
uh so it's it's kind of swinging between
60 and 30 and that really does present a
very worst case scenario I mean that's kind of like an artificial situation
where you're looking down at something intensive like a scene with a bunch of
stuff exploding and then swinging your your camera up to the ceiling and then
back down and then back up and then back down and back up and you're trying to
make the experience disconcerting and that's the
worst case scenario that we're kind of looking at over there and even
then it's pretty darn
smooth someone says g-sync
will somehow adoption will affect it it doesn't g-sync will affect the people
who by the gear that runs it there
there's no we don't have to wait for any industry adoption other than making sure
that there are monitors that have the technology built into them which NVIDIA
is saying will be available as as early as q1 next year so it'll be up to the
individual to adopt it and enjoy it and
that's that it'll work on any game uh it'll work on any Kepler based GPU and
it'll work on any g-sync enabled Monitor and you don't have to wait for game
developers to enable anything you don't have to wait for any else anything else
to happen Okay my uh my last question is
you guys talk about how you'll be able to develop games differently if you
don't have to Target a particular frame rate using a technology like g-sync but
with g-sync we're going to be looking at a very small initial user base because
it's based on a Kepler GPU and a particular monitor that has a particular
Hardware chip in it um pull up the crystal all again so is this within the
next 5 years that you'll be able to actually forget about a Target frame
rate with the game and assume that the end user can experience it the way that
JN can deliver I think this is going to be pretty broadly picked up because this
is not like it doubles the size of the die of something to do this it's not
that expensive of the technology I have no idea what nidia's licensing costs and
what are going to be on here but uh I
this is something that should be broadly adopted from a pure technology
standpoint this is just the right thing and I obviously in early years this is
just going to be a smoothness benefit for for people but in the space of five
years or something I would hope something like this is pretty much this
absolutely you also there's a limited amount of of things a monitor
manufacturer or TV manufacturer can actually compete on once you have 4 put
stupid things in a lot of cases this is actually a good thing please remove the
the sharpening the detection and the motion compensation and actually add
this and W 4K pixels would be nice also and 120 HZ or more
uh I think there will be when people actually see it and play it as you guys
been doing and more and more people see that there will actually be a lot of lot
of movement in the overall industry to transition to something like this really
quite quickly and that's what I'm hoping for because then we can actually just I say Target games more specifically for
this yeah exactly the rest of the industry needs to Hardware up
um every display device every platform
including you know the mobile platforms we need to adopt this kind of Technology
over the next uh few years because it's it's visually striking um doesn't show
up in a TV commercial but it's uh to any
player playing the game it's incredibly apparent um the difference and visual
quality here and so it's got to be a major Initiative for everybody or else
people are going to look at and say oh wow that looks like you know the last generation and actually one one wish I
have there is that while you're going to these uh well these retail stores with
sell tons and tons of TV displays or monitors and you see all of them
standing there really nice monitors well really nice big screen TVs and they look
amazing and all of them are set on actually a a startup showroom mode that
just cranks up all of the colors I would like to replace that remove that mode
showroom mode is the is does not exist anymore instead you just have this
variable refresh rate and you actually see the difference on that the false
colors you don't want to have that anyway that's not calibrated to anything
that we actually create it just creates a complet artificial environment plus
all the other that you're do there to support Legacy
cont well
said look like we're going to be here for a little while longer let me take a bathroom
break absolutely so uh by is there
Logistics wise you know got a time here I think it's it's 2:30 hey guys just
just one second this is Jensen hey John don't don't
hold it for just just a second it turns out I've got to go catch a flight I
didn't want to I didn't want to take off without thanking you guys properly uh
you you guys you guys not only made made the show um made the launch uh you guys
made made our year I mean this it is it is a quite a privilege to have you guys
anywhere but to have the three of you guys in the same place at the same time
and having this kind of access to you guys is really really a privilege it's a
privilege for me I know it's a privilege for everybody in the audience and it's just so much fun to listen to you guys I
want to thank you guys for everything you've done for the game industry but
not just the game industry for the computer industry the technology
industry and just good oldfashioned human beings in general okay I think you
guys are fantastic I love you guys love your friendship and love your
partnership thanks for everything
uh 4K versus gsync what is more
important to gaming J yeah I mean at this point we'll get we
will always be able to suck up more resolution but right now people migrate
to 4K and they get much lower frame rates on the experience and I think the
trade-offs already a little bit south of optimal I that people are making now and
quadrupling down on that yeah I don't
think while a GN will just make everything somewhat
better think you don't want to go back to anything
else well I've got the whole issue about the the low persistence displays that
that I have to deal with on the head mounted uh display systems and but I
think that for a conventional desktop monitor I would I really want to see
this just absolutely ridiculous the good news is it doesn't
have to be or there either yes it's a shame that those 4K
monitors fact there are not GCC because you see them jutting and tearing and
exactly the problems we've been talking about now uh it's actually almost an
object lesson there and it's a shame that we don't have those we're working on it we're working
on it sc4k is kind of a workstation
application for the next few years right uh in that time frame we'll be using
those monitors for building games because we want to have a huge set of complex tools open uh photographers will
be using for their were videographers lots of people will be using but I don't
think it's the right output resolution for rendering until your GP is get
significantly faster at consumer levels like once that 20 terap fops is in a
single GPU uh costing 300 bucks that's
when you want to go 4K it's when you can sustain 30 to 60 to 90 frames a second
and actually just to to roll up on that
the environment of where I work just on my own desk essentially have well I
guess it's score portrait mode with 4in screen and a 4K screen next to that and
they they're putting them in half circle around you is actually a really good
work work environment work space so having a single 4K screen that's that's
curved and 50 in or something that would actually replace four of my screens and
would be amazing work environment for that and I probably W could definitely
play games in an extremely immersive way there also and you're starting to see
these curved screen curved OLED screens in that size so ad JN on it and B to 120
HZ you have perfect gaming and perfect workation while we're at it I want
spical section SC SC so that everything focuses properly on that's also