NVIDIA Conference Vlog Part 2.2 -The Way It's Meant To Be Played 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
4,475 words · ~22 min read
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I am recording now please go all right so the core thing about gsync uh that
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they're touting here is the ability that lets you get away from completely
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isochronous or fixed time slices for your games now time slices have been
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with us for the 50 years since television when you've got you had to
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refresh the screen in these continuous patterns because the from the phosphor
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just decayed it went away with back lit LCD displays the light's continuous
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there so there is no sensible reason why we have to be doing that and because we
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are we get these artifacts of either tear or jutter so it's really good to
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get away from that now if you try for a high frame rate like 60 frames per
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second which I've been a big proponent of if you miss it hurts really bad you
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you know you drop all the way down to 30 frames per second while with something
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like g-sync if you if you take 17 milliseconds instead of 16 milliseconds
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nobody can even tell it just comes out as a tiny delay on the frame and that's
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a wonderful thing so that's one real Advantage if you're trying hard for a
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frame rate it makes your inevitable Miss imperceptible if you're not even trying
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if you're just making a game that's randomly running at whatever the hell frame rate it turns out it magically
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works out on this if you're going between 20 and 80 frames per second like
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you know a lot of games will if they're unconstrained there this makes that
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beneficial it means that it's smooth at 20 but then at 80 it's silky and this is
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a really great thing now the interesting
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tension that we've got here is that I didn't really appreciate this a year ago
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but the persistence on a display the fact that it is continuously illuminated
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contributes to a lot of subtle blurring effects on the screen when you look at
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like a text uh you know like a web page if you pan it across the screen smoothly
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or if you scroll like an iPad or something even if it's scrolling at a
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perfect 60 frames per second smoothness it's hard to read because it feels
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blurred in the direction that it's moving and that is a consequence of the
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persistence the fact that it's continuously illuminated the solution to
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that is to only illuminate it very briefly now this happened automatically
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for CRT displays as the Electron Beam scanned over you only had you know
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micros seconds of Illumination from that before it went away and there's a
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category of people that would talk about like sports broadcasting where they'd complain it's never been the same since
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you got flat panels because everything is a little bit more smeared on the pans
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I never really noticed that so much but in a head mounted display it is night
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and day it is one of the more dramatic technology demos that you can do to have
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a display that you can switch between low persistence and full persistence
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it's a big deal now the interesting thing is in the last couple years
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NVIDIA's had their light boost technology for the 3D uh Vision stuff
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and you could put that in you could use that as a low persistence monitor people
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wrote firmware hacks to be able to do this so if you made 120 HZ game and Doom
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3 BFG was one of the few things that because it's old game and we paid a
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little bit of attention you could run it at 120 frames per second locked and you
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could put it into a mode like this and it was pretty awesome but no modern game
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runs at 120 frames per second you know let alone stereo for a head mounted
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display because right now people will just say uh I'm a 30 HZ game and why
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bother and even if you try for 60 you know that's enough Blood Sweat and Tears
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to get there pushing further Beyond his hard but g-sync makes it a smooth
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Continuum so every bit that you do to help helps you know it is better to be
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at 70 than to 6 then 60 it's better to be at 40 than 30 this is a good thing
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and I think that this will be a path that can start bringing some games up
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now we've got the other tension of like 4K displays it's like okay let's go back
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down to 30 frames per second to do a 4K display but at least there's the option
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of possibly pushing up because once you get over 90 95 Hertz ideally up to 120
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or 144 some of these monitors will run at you can start doing this low
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persistence stuff but the problem with this and this is an interesting tension
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I if you do the low persistence and you vary your frame rate then it changes the
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intensity of what you're looking at so what needs to happen is you need to vary
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the length of the illumination based on how long the frame rate was Now g-sync
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can do all of these things they actually they they didn't want us to really talk
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about this aspect of g-sync because they thought it would confuse the you know uh
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the people listening but I I actually think that's pretty important where it's
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got the low persistence option right now it's binary you can go to 120 Hertz and
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be low persistence or you can be at variable frame rate but there's no
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reason why this can't be combined where you start adapting one towards the other
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then you get this option where the best world the best case of this would be the
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game is running if it's running at 20 30 frames per second it's full persistence
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it's just variable but as the game creeps up and it gets over 90 frames per
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second then it can start adapting the backl to it and that'd be great so you
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might have a game where only in some simple scenes are you at low persistence
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wonderfulness while in your mass outdoor exploding everything then it's falling
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down it's full persistence but that would be great it's making things better
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where they can be better and there's a lot of other uses for this type of thing
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like I had mentioned Android specifically because I did complain that
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you take the like the NVIDIA Shield where it's got should have plenty of
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horsepower but if you play Sonic on it it drops frames every now and then and
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that's not the fault of the GPU or the CPU it's the fault largely of the power
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management and what happens on Android where they're they're constantly trying
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to save power by adapting the core count and the frequencies on these things and
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unfortunately what happens is they often pull the power down until you start
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dropping frames which is exactly the wrong thing to do so we could fight that
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by saying well we want a dedicated amount of core cores and frequency but
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then you waste power where really the optimal thing would be let them manage
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the power as they do now and use variable refresh technology to just mean
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when you slightly Miss it's it's it will be imperceptible if you go to 17
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milliseconds for your frame in instead of 15 there and that will be a great
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thing but even NVIDIA's knows that even though they own that platform it's going
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to be integrating with another display vendor pushing things through
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integrating with more Android stack these are hard cross compan issues and
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NVIDIA it's great that NVIDIA did this I've been harping on this for a number
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of years but it took something a company like NVIDIA that can change gpus and
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that can change the hardware that can write the driers for that can you know
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leverage the display vendors to actually put something like this in it could have
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happened five years ago it would have been good to happen 5 years ago but you
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know it's finally happening now well that's fantastic thank you very
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much I'm sure everyone appreciated you taking the time I would offer to shake
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your hand and thank you but I'm pretty burdened here right now okay all right
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we're going to go try to intercept Tim Sweeney
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hey Tim can I borrow you for just a
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couple minutes just to basically say hi to the viewers sure okay I am going to
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have to okay this is very challenging okay but you can you kind of reach past
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me here and do you see channel one where it's there's an A and an M yeah can you
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switch that to a and then same with Channel
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2 so there you guys have it Tim Sweeney touched my
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camera um so we've got about 3,000 viewers on here right now that are that
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are watching live so if uh you know what I guess probably the most appropriate
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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
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oh sure um it is a really important piece of technology it enables a games
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Runing at any frame rate to have the smoothness uh that you get from running
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at a constant frame rate you know right now to achieve 60 frames a second
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perfect smoothest um you have to make great sacrifices in the game um and if
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you just go one frame below it to 59 and suddenly your gain's interrupted by
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these massive stutters and the gsync tech uh really creates a Continuum um so
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that whatever level of uh frames the game is outputting can be displayed
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smoothly and without these crazy artifacts that you have in games
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nowadays it means uh Gamers game
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developers will be able to create really awesome levels of content and still
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achieve the sort of smoothness uh that you get in games like Call of Duty for
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example I mean one of the things that the average person I think really
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doesn't understand is they'll they're quick to blame any kind of a frame rate
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issue on well the game optimization isn't very good can you talk a little
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bit about the Bal the delicate balancing act that you guys go through to deliver
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both great level of detail and a smooth gaming
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experience sure it's a constant trade-off for a game developer um you
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know with Gears of War for example we aimed at uh creating the most impressive
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visual experience we could while trying to hit 30 frames a second pretty
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consistently um but uh you know once in a while
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there's a moment when the game drops below that and it really impacts the
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quality because you're not dropping to 29 or 28 frames a second you're
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jittering back and forth between 20 and 30 and it's just a it's just really bad
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this Tech makes it much easier to develop games that have a high level of smoothness and that's going to mean a
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lot more games will be smooth in the future it's it's one of those kind of
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magical technologies that you don't necessarily look at the screen and
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recognize exactly what's going wrong it just looks wrong and it looks uh jittery
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and unrealistic for uh reasons that are hard to identify but when you see it
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working perfectly it's an entirely different experience so in your mind would we see
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something akin to gsync on handhelds
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televisions along with PC monitors and how far out do you see that in the
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future I mean how much would you love to have this on the console we'd love to
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have this everywhere um televisions projectors uh mobile LCD display plays
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um it's going to be especially important for you know products like Oculus uh
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where you want to have a very high and consistent frame rate uh for past
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response time this technology it's starting like almost everything um it's
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an innovation in the industry it's starting on high-end PC and it will work
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its way throughout the rest of the industry over the coming
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years all right well I don't want to take up too much of your time I know
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that you're supposed to be up here for the panel but I appreciate you uh just
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taking the time to say hi to the viewers and uh I I would Shake sh your hand but
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um if nothing else I'm going to try we'll have like a photo op sort of there
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like gster that's the best we were able to do thank you so much for taking the
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time yeah so there you guys go have you
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forgiven the enforcer now forcer is not a bad guy because he he he helped us
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sync up with Tim Sweeney so there you go yeah that's what they call me now
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there there's Tim over there actually he wandered away from us over
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to the g-sync demo you can see he's got his face about 4 in
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from the screen okay maybe we're not going to leave him alone just
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yet oh okay just for fun we're going to
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bother you again here you're you're playing around with the demo right now
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correct yes yes this has three modes vsync no vsync and gsync um of course in
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a video of this you are not going to see any of what I'm talking about um but the
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difference in smoothness is really impressive with vsync you see uh
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uh you don't see tearing artifacts but you do see an inconsistency with the
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frame rate consistently you know jittering back and forth between one frame rate and another because of the
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way that the frame rates are discretized well I never knew what was wrong vsync
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always felt off to me I never liked it
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well it's subtle so you turn off vsync and you have a different set of areas
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which is that each scan line is independently experiencing its own um
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discretization but now you're getting this tearing where uh half of the screen
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is the previous frame and half of the screen is the next frame wherever
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arbitrarily in time the they change head and then what you think it's always
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flipping at the right time it's displaying frames at a consistent rate
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and so you get a lack of jittering artifacts and look here the frame rate
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is varying here in places it's dropping probably even below oh definitely around
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30 frames a second uh but this smooth
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dropping from 60 down to 30 is much much less disturbing than dropping frames one
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at a time and what you're looking at right now looks like a very extreme
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example it looks like the first looks like the first thing Tim did when he got
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here was cranked the frame time minimums all the way down and the maximums all
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the way up or was it already like that when you got here uh no I did this this
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is really the worst case so when the de so the way the Demo's running here let
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me show you this guys this is like a Mayhem and a multiplayer game where
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they're enormous numbers of players just causing crazy spikes in frame time all
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the time but here what you think you won't appreciate it in this video uh
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because it's a video of a screen with a different display resolution and uh
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sampling rate but it's just uh it is Flawless to the point where there's this
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Sol text on the spinning pendulum and you can actually read it um which is
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astonishing because if you go turn off bsync then it's tearing it makes it hard
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it's distracting your eye away from it um it's a it's making a really big
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quantitative difference very cool okay thank you we
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really will we really will stop bothering you you know thank
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you so guys I mean you would never really see okay so the way the demo set
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up for minimum and maximum frame times
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uh so it's it's kind of swinging between
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60 and 30 and that really does present a
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very worst case scenario I mean that's kind of like an artificial situation
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where you're looking down at something intensive like a scene with a bunch of
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stuff exploding and then swinging your your camera up to the ceiling and then
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back down and then back up and then back down and back up and you're trying to
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make the experience disconcerting and that's the
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worst case scenario that we're kind of looking at over there and even
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then it's pretty darn
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smooth someone says g-sync
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will somehow adoption will affect it it doesn't g-sync will affect the people
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who by the gear that runs it there
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there's no we don't have to wait for any industry adoption other than making sure
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that there are monitors that have the technology built into them which NVIDIA
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is saying will be available as as early as q1 next year so it'll be up to the
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individual to adopt it and enjoy it and
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that's that it'll work on any game uh it'll work on any Kepler based GPU and
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it'll work on any g-sync enabled Monitor and you don't have to wait for game
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developers to enable anything you don't have to wait for any else anything else
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to happen Okay my uh my last question is
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you guys talk about how you'll be able to develop games differently if you
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don't have to Target a particular frame rate using a technology like g-sync but
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with g-sync we're going to be looking at a very small initial user base because
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it's based on a Kepler GPU and a particular monitor that has a particular
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Hardware chip in it um pull up the crystal all again so is this within the
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next 5 years that you'll be able to actually forget about a Target frame
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rate with the game and assume that the end user can experience it the way that
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JN can deliver I think this is going to be pretty broadly picked up because this
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is not like it doubles the size of the die of something to do this it's not
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that expensive of the technology I have no idea what nidia's licensing costs and
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what are going to be on here but uh I
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this is something that should be broadly adopted from a pure technology
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standpoint this is just the right thing and I obviously in early years this is
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just going to be a smoothness benefit for for people but in the space of five
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years or something I would hope something like this is pretty much this
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absolutely you also there's a limited amount of of things a monitor
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manufacturer or TV manufacturer can actually compete on once you have 4 put
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stupid things in a lot of cases this is actually a good thing please remove the
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the sharpening the detection and the motion compensation and actually add
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this and W 4K pixels would be nice also and 120 HZ or more
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uh I think there will be when people actually see it and play it as you guys
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been doing and more and more people see that there will actually be a lot of lot
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of movement in the overall industry to transition to something like this really
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quite quickly and that's what I'm hoping for because then we can actually just I say Target games more specifically for
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this yeah exactly the rest of the industry needs to Hardware up
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um every display device every platform
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including you know the mobile platforms we need to adopt this kind of Technology
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over the next uh few years because it's it's visually striking um doesn't show
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up in a TV commercial but it's uh to any
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player playing the game it's incredibly apparent um the difference and visual
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quality here and so it's got to be a major Initiative for everybody or else
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people are going to look at and say oh wow that looks like you know the last generation and actually one one wish I
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have there is that while you're going to these uh well these retail stores with
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sell tons and tons of TV displays or monitors and you see all of them
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standing there really nice monitors well really nice big screen TVs and they look
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amazing and all of them are set on actually a a startup showroom mode that
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just cranks up all of the colors I would like to replace that remove that mode
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showroom mode is the is does not exist anymore instead you just have this
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variable refresh rate and you actually see the difference on that the false
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colors you don't want to have that anyway that's not calibrated to anything
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that we actually create it just creates a complet artificial environment plus
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all the other that you're do there to support Legacy
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cont well
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said look like we're going to be here for a little while longer let me take a bathroom
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break absolutely so uh by is there
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Logistics wise you know got a time here I think it's it's 2:30 hey guys just
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just one second this is Jensen hey John don't don't
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hold it for just just a second it turns out I've got to go catch a flight I
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didn't want to I didn't want to take off without thanking you guys properly uh
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you you guys you guys not only made made the show um made the launch uh you guys
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made made our year I mean this it is it is a quite a privilege to have you guys
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anywhere but to have the three of you guys in the same place at the same time
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and having this kind of access to you guys is really really a privilege it's a
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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
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want to thank you guys for everything you've done for the game industry but
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not just the game industry for the computer industry the technology
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industry and just good oldfashioned human beings in general okay I think you
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guys are fantastic I love you guys love your friendship and love your
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partnership thanks for everything
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uh 4K versus gsync what is more
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important to gaming J yeah I mean at this point we'll get we
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will always be able to suck up more resolution but right now people migrate
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to 4K and they get much lower frame rates on the experience and I think the
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trade-offs already a little bit south of optimal I that people are making now and
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quadrupling down on that yeah I don't
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think while a GN will just make everything somewhat
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better think you don't want to go back to anything
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else well I've got the whole issue about the the low persistence displays that
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that I have to deal with on the head mounted uh display systems and but I
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think that for a conventional desktop monitor I would I really want to see
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this just absolutely ridiculous the good news is it doesn't
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have to be or there either yes it's a shame that those 4K
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monitors fact there are not GCC because you see them jutting and tearing and
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exactly the problems we've been talking about now uh it's actually almost an
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object lesson there and it's a shame that we don't have those we're working on it we're working
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on it sc4k is kind of a workstation
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application for the next few years right uh in that time frame we'll be using
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those monitors for building games because we want to have a huge set of complex tools open uh photographers will
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be using for their were videographers lots of people will be using but I don't
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think it's the right output resolution for rendering until your GP is get
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significantly faster at consumer levels like once that 20 terap fops is in a
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single GPU uh costing 300 bucks that's
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when you want to go 4K it's when you can sustain 30 to 60 to 90 frames a second
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and actually just to to roll up on that
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the environment of where I work just on my own desk essentially have well I
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guess it's score portrait mode with 4in screen and a 4K screen next to that and
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they they're putting them in half circle around you is actually a really good
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work work environment work space so having a single 4K screen that's that's
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curved and 50 in or something that would actually replace four of my screens and
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would be amazing work environment for that and I probably W could definitely
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play games in an extremely immersive way there also and you're starting to see
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these curved screen curved OLED screens in that size so ad JN on it and B to 120
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HZ you have perfect gaming and perfect workation while we're at it I want
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spical section SC SC so that everything focuses properly on that's also