 Nvidia's original G-Sync technology has largely kept the promises that it made five years ago of eliminating tearing, input lag, and stutter in high-end gaming displays. But the how of this technology is something that they've kept under wraps... until now. Which is what makes today's video really, really special. Because Nvidia sponsored our trip down to Santa Clara today where we will be the first non-NVIDIA personnel to ever see one of their G-Sync optical labs. So let's go find out how you make a gaming monitor, shall we? Now Nvidia doesn't actually manufacture display panels. That work is best left to the experts at Samsung, LG Display, AU Optronics, and the like. But inside this cage, behind me is a sample of every G-Sync monitor that has ever been built. And the thing is, there's far more to creating a great finished gaming display than just taking whatever panel those guys hand you, slapping it into an enclosure, and calling it a day. In fact, while the situation has improved a lot, especially on the desktop, Nvidia still fails over 50% of the laptop displays that get sent to them for validation. So each one of these, assuming that they don't immediately fail the more basic checks, will get subjected to over 300 tests, some of which take hours or even multiple days to run. So I feel kind of bad for the techs who drew the short straw for our visit today and had to shut down. You see, the issue, and actually the reason that the walls are all painted black in here, is that with our filming lights on, they can't run any real tests because the results will be invalid. So we're gonna try to get out of their way real quick here. On this bench then is our first real test here. So it's a pretty simple one on the surface, but it's one that will weed out a surprising number of variable refresh rate displays. So our GPU here runs a benchmark with extreme swings in the frame rate, which is designed to expose weaknesses in the T-con or timing controller, which is the part of the panel that takes the output from the scalar and translates it into something that the actual drivers of the TFT matrix can understand. Now the results of these failures are usually quite obvious because if a T-con experiences a firmware problem, for example, causing an overflow condition, its go-to emergency response is generally to blank out parts of the panel or even the entire thing temporarily to prevent it from being damaged. Apparently they actually had one of those come through here just the other day. But that doesn't mean that running these tests is simple. For one thing these kinds of problems can be weird edge cases. I mean, that's why the manufacturer didn't notice them. So they can take a long time to manifest, which is why they run for up to 48 hours before assigning a pass. And for another, just hooking a source up to a bare notebook LCD is an ordeal and a half. So of course you need a mobile GPU in order to validate mobile displays, but using a standard desktop test bench would save you a lot of time. So check out this Frankenstein creation. I've actually got another one right here. So this, according to the folks here, is a Turing mobile GPU, but soldered on to a development board with just like this cooler just plugs straight into 12 volt power. It just runs at full speed all the time. That's why these things are so loud and then it's just bristling with diagnostic readouts and sort of measurement points. And then there's the really cool stuff. So this right here is our DVI output or something that's on a daughter board for some reason. And on the back here, this is really cool. So these interfaces back here are designed for all of the different implementations of embedded display port that you might see from the various panel manufacturers. So they make their own daughter board PCBs here so they can adapt this weird development card to run any display that they want. On to our next test though. One of the hardest parts of creating a variable refresh rate display is preventing flickering. But the thing is, not everyone perceives flicker the same. And even if a flicker isn't visible to the eye, it can still cause fatigue and headaches. So that is where this test comes in. Now, it doesn't look like much, but the lab techs here can change this boring gray screen to output any refresh rate they want. Then they use this Klein Instruments K10A, a basic luminance meter, to measure the amplitude in decibels of any changes in the output brightness. Then, that is of course assuming that the panel makes it this far, they use this special box of Nvidia's own creation to kind of like a like a doctor checking your like heartbeat or something. Check all the different areas of the panel to see which one is the worst and then ensure that even that is still within spec. Rounding out panel selection is a whole battery of other tests. Color reproduction, color gamut, absolute luminance, native contrast ratio, pixel response times. You pretty much name it. Then, we can move into this room. Once the panel is validated, it can move on to stage two, actual display development. At this point, things get a lot pickier. So this $40,000 to $50,000 XY positioning jib is precise to 1 tenth of a millimeter. So what they do is they light up the display. So the one that we're looking at right here is a G-Sync Ultimate unit with HDR10 support at up to 1,000 nits peak brightness and then they take measurements across the entire surface to ensure that it's uniform. It's pretty freaking intense. Except that is just scratching the surface. So this display also features 384 zone full array backlighting and handling that evenly is really freaking tricky. In this test, Nvidia is evaluating each of the individual LEDs that makes up the backlight array. Not just off and at full force, but at its various steps in between because you guys gotta understand they need to account not just for the drive level of each one of these zones, but even the neighboring light bleed from other zones around them. And then making matters worse, the whole thing has got to work perfectly at every brightness level and every refresh rate. Huh! So then, once the luminance behavior of the panel is characterized, it's either fantastic out of the box, ready to go, or much more likely, it needs some work. It's no bloody wonder that these 4K 144Hz HDR displays got delayed, right? Speaking of delays, in this room also professionally darkened out. Don't you love it when like an engineer is given a problem and told to solve it quickly? Love this. Anyway, in here is one of Nvidia's BFGD or big format gaming displays. Now, the process you're seeing here is nothing special if you've ever professionally calibrated a display before. Basically, a signal generator, so this laptop, outputs a known value, let's say white, or other more different white, or red or something, and then a sensor like this spectroradiometer checks how close it is to what it's expecting. But, what's different about Nvidia's approach here is that instead of just calibrating finished displays, during the development process, they're jumping in to make sure that there are no underlying issues with the technology that are going to crop up while operating in variable refresh rate mode that can't be corrected. Because the thing is, many LCD characteristics change when the refresh rate changes. Another fun one to deal with is overdrive. So, overdrive basically works like this. You've got a pixel and you want to take it from level 100 to level 200, which might take it, let's say, 8 milliseconds natively. Well, if that's not good enough for the performance you want, with overdrive, we can tell that pixel, I want 250. And because that's a bigger change, it's going to reach our actual desired level of 200 faster. So you're basically giving it a bigger kick, so that you might get there in just 4 or 6 milliseconds. The trick though, is to not go too high, or you'll get too high of a value, overshooting the intended target. Now here's the thing, at 60Hz fixed refresh rate, this is relatively simple. So the monitor just has a lookup table built into it of what it should shoot for in order to have the value be correct by the next 16.6ms refresh cycle. With variable refresh rate, well, it has to compensate how much of an extra kick it's giving, according to how much more or how much less time it's going to have to get to the actual desired value. And even driving the LEDs in the backlight is a complicated matter. So this is the back of a G-Sync Ultimate Desktop Monitor, but the internal guts here are actually fundamentally similar to the BFGD that we just saw. So at its heart is the powerful G-Sync processor that contains much of G-Sync's special sauce, then around it is kind of like the motherboard of a monitor. So this here is something that the manufacturer of the monitor would customize, depending on what they want for display connectors, USB hubs, built-in audio, that sort of thing. Then finally, there's a third part here. So these are kind of like the wings that make G-Sync HDR fly. So these driver ICs right here take a digital signal from the G-Sync module scaler for what the luminance level should be for each of the 384 LEDs that make up the backlight here. Then they output a given DC voltage to each of the 16 transistors that drive the current that actually lights up the individual LED in each zone just the right amount. But like, hold on, hold on a second here. A Corsair Commander Pro can drive dozens of RGB LEDs per channel with like four wires. What is all of this for? Well, here's the thing. At 144 Hz, you've got under 7 milliseconds per frame, and you have to both determine and write all 384 of those values each frame and add up to a thousand nitspeak brightness. So this is not a trivial task. Like, man, I can imagine the meeting where they decided to build this thing right now. Like, alright, team. So we've never built a TV before. So the plan is to build the most difficult one. LOL, good luck everyone, and break. Which leads us finally to certification. Now, the third and final stage might not be that visually interesting, but it's arguably the most important. So this is the point at which Nvidia receives the first finished units of each display and goes through that whole ordeal again to ensure that nothing got lost in translation. And I have to say, going behind the scenes today gave me a much deeper appreciation for what Nvidia has been doing in the display industry. The eagle-eyed among you, for example, might have noticed that one of those backlight driver boards on this prototype has an Nvidia silkscreen on it, while the other one has something else. That's because as part of developing G-Sync Ultimate, Nvidia actually created the reference design for these driver boards, since nobody had ever done a 384 zone 27 inch panel before. Now, unfortunately, I wasn't able to show you guys everything that I saw, but what I can say is that my experience today has shown me definitively that this is far more than just a rubber stamping certification fee operation. So then there are three tiers of G-Sync now. G-Sync compatible displays don't go through anything that you saw today. Nvidia performs four variable refresh rate tests to ensure that they're suitable for a basic VRR gaming experience. Then there's G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate, where you're getting the deep collaboration between your graphics card manufacturer and your display maker, with Ultimate also including support for HDR gaming, which as we've discussed in the past, looks pretty freaking sick. So that's it for today, guys. Massive thank you to you for watching and to Nvidia for sponsoring this video and just straight up allowing us a peek behind the kimono. This was absolutely incredible. If this video sucked, you guys know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join, especially if you have any questions about building a fantastic gaming rig or buying a variable refresh rate monitor or whatever the case may be.