Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 – The Nitty Gritty

VSync, what is it to start off? VSync or Vertical Synchronisation as its known is a solution that was designed long ago to rectify the issues caused when the frame rates given by any game went over and above that of the display and caused ‘tearing’ to occur on screen. Not only did this tearing scenario occur at higher rates which was more common, but it also happens when the frame rate dropped to below the refresh rate of the display.

VSync works to limit the frame rate to that of the display, so for example on a 60Hz display the frame rate is limited to 60fps, but the side effect of this is when the in-game frame rate drops below that refresh rate of the display, the VSync reverts down to a lower refresh rate of 30Hz or any multiple of 60Hz in this case such as 20Hz or even 15Hz in the worst case. This would introduce whats known as stuttering where this change is happening.

To cut out the stuttering experienced from having VSync enabled, a number of people tend to disable this option, enabling the frame rate to fluctuate freely above and below what the displays refresh rate can handle and whilst on the most part this has no real issues on the lower end of the scale, when the frame rate is higher, frame will occur at the higher end when the display is trying to process images too fast and ends up showing part of one and part of another (or more). This for gamers is just as bad as the stuttering that VSync causes.

Nvidia’s software team have tackled this very problematic situation and in their course have developed Adaptive VSync. This gives the best of both worlds simply put.  When at higher frame rates, VSync is enabled, limiting the frame output to the refresh rate of the display thus preventing the tearing that is mentioned above. When the frame rates drop however, the Adaptive VSync disables automatically to allow the frame rate to run fluidly eliminating the stuttering that would otherwise occur from having VSync permanently enabled.