 Unless you make a habit of living under a rock, or if you're just not that into gaming, that too, you've probably seen the headlines. AMD FreeSync working on GeForce cards! And it's true, but there's a catch. So the current methods for enabling FreeSync on a GeForce graphics card require you to also have an AMD GPU in your system that is capable of supporting FreeSync itself. So today's video, then, has us trying it out to see if it's worth the hassle to save money on a G-Sync monitor. And, while we're at it, we were thinking maybe we'd try to run G-Sync on an AMD graphics card! Hahahaha! [♪ music playing, no audio for this part, just a little music playing for the end of the video. Thanks for watching! And don't forget to subscribe for more videos! See you next time! Bye bye!] [♪ music playing, no audio for this part, just a little music playing for the end of the video. Thanks for watching! And don't forget to subscribe for more videos! See you next time! Bye bye!] Rosewill's new Prism S500 case lights the way with its array of RGB fans, tempered glass panel, and spacious interior. Click the link below to learn more. So let's start with how this works. There are actually two different ways to go about this. There's the GPU way and the APU way. So we'll be using the APU method for the uninitiated. And APU is AMD's name for a CPU that has a graphics processor built into it. Now normally, as soon as you install a dedicated graphics card, your onboard graphics gets disabled, because who would use that when you can use this? But, for what we're doing, we actually need to force the Vega 11 GPU that's built into our Ryzen 5 2400G on. So we're going to change IGFX MultiMonitor to Enabled, and we are going to set the primary video device to our onboard graphics. Let's go ahead and reboot. Now while we wait for that to happen, let's talk about what's going on under the hood here. If you watched our gaming on Linux video a little while ago, we showed a piece of software called Looking Glass, that Wendel from Level One Text was using to game with very low latency in Linux by running the game effectively in a virtual machine that was running Windows, and then capturing its output. TLDR, the API that Windows is using here is called DXGI, and what it does is essentially mirror the output from one card to another with very little delay, though there is still a delay. So as you can see here, we've already got our GeForce driver installed and working. So the next thing we need to do, we've already downloaded it here, is install the drivers for our Radeon graphics. Now that our Radeon drivers are installed, which, yes, is working correctly, we need to change our display configuration a little bit here. So what we want is our FreeSync monitor plugged into our onboard graphics, and we want nothing plugged in to our GeForce graphics card. One cool thing, by the way, is that because of the way that this works, in theory, we could actually do the same thing with Intel's upcoming integrated graphics with FreeSync support. That's not confirmed at this time yet, though. So now that all of this is done, we can go into our display settings, then on the bottom, we're going to see an option here for graphics settings. Now all we need to do is add whatever we want to run here. Okay, so now we go into options, and then we just need to set our graphics preference. So we're going to set that to high performance right about here. See, here's our power saving GPU, here's our high performance one. Now, when we launch this demo, theoretically, FreeSync technology will work. We can actually test it, too. Check this out. So let's go ahead and turn AMD FreeSync off. Oh, we got to turn Vsync off for one thing. Okay, there we go. That's more like it. Now let's turn FreeSync off, and boom, there's our tearing. Let's go ahead and do an FPS sweep so we can get some really nasty tearing there. Yep. Now let's turn FreeSync back on. Oh, buttersmith. Need write. All right, so let's try Counter-Strike. So Vsync's off. Let's see how smooth this is. So in theory, this DXGI thing only adds about one to two milliseconds of additional lag. So for the people out there claiming they can feel the difference, okay, maybe. But you're probably superhuman because at 60 frames per second, that is... What does that work out to? Wait, oh, wow, this feels like ass. I think this is running on the wrong GPU. So it's a little kludgy for every one of your... There we go. For every one of your programs, you're going to have to actually change that. Let's see if we can just re-maximize it and it'll run on the right one. Yeah, that super did not work. Let's try relaunching it. There we go. That's more like it. All right, I am getting a friggin' mess ton of tearing here. When you're running FreeSync, are you supposed to enable Vsync within the game? Oh, well, there's our problem. Also, the developer console isn't enabled, crying out loud. One problem with CSGO, though, is that it's not demanding enough for us to dip below 60 frames per second. So it's not really giving us a benefit over just running Vsync, other than theoretically a little bit less lag. So what we're going to do then is we're going to fire up Deus Ex Mankind Divided. You can really tell it's much smoother. Wow, I suck. All right, so here we go. Now we are right in the sweet spot where we're going to be benefiting from our FreeSync display, where we're not quite able to maintain 60 frames per second, but we're right in that 45 to 50 FPS range. One kind of annoying thing about this game is it has some on-screen effects that kind of look like tearing, but we are not... Oh, see, like that, but that's not that. That's me dying. I can't believe that this is working. Like, this just blows me away. Okay, so remember how I said that because of the way this works, we could in theory use Intel's iGPU for FreeSync with an Nvidia card actually churning through the frames. Once those come out, that got us thinking, what if we did it the other way around? What if you're on Team Red, so you're running like a Vega 64, but some baller new gaming monitor is only available in a G-Sync flavor? Wow, that happened so fast, I didn't even get a chance to show you guys. Check this out. So as soon as we plugged it in, boom! G-Sync display connected. What? So we'll go ahead and fire that up. Enable G-Sync, enable G-Sync for all the things. Now all we have to do is the same process, but in reverse, going into our graphics settings and going, okay, CSGO, we don't want high performance, we want power saving. Now we can launch Counter-Strike, and in theory, we'll be running G-Sync through our Nvidia graphics card, but we'll actually be rendering with our onboard graphics. Now, that wouldn't make a lot of sense in this case, but if you were running something like a Vega 64, and then you just installed like a GeForce 950 or something in another slot, you could make it work. Whether or not you should make it work is another question though, because unless someone automates this GPU switching process, it is a bit of a pain in the butt, at least at this time. And it's not that cost effective, because one way or another, you will have to have two GPUs. Would you look at that? It feels a little leggy, but that's because we're running at 33 frames per second. There's no tearing, and it's as smooth as it could be given the situation. Now, one way that you could make this solution make sense would be if you had some old compatible hardware lying around, or actually maybe if you're Team Green in terms of your gaming rig, but you wanted to hook your gaming machine up to one of Samsung's FreeSync TVs, for example, because until BFGDs actually make their way to the market, there are no large format G-Sync displays. That could be pretty cool, but in most cases, you'll probably end up spending more than you are actually saving, or very close, for what isn't an amazing experience. The real takeaway is that we shouldn't have to do any of this. FreeSync and VESA AdaptiveSync are both industry standards at this point, and NVIDIA, if you're listening, we're not saying that you need to ditch G-Sync. We know that you guys have special green G-Sync sauce that you pour on it that makes it a little better, in your opinions. Personally, I haven't looked at it with a high-speed camera yet, but you guys think it's better, so okay. We're just saying that, like CUDA and OpenCL, there's no reason that you couldn't support both, especially since, as we've demonstrated here, there's no physical link reason that you couldn't support both. Team Group is sponsoring this video with their Delta RGB SSD. Yes, my friends, it's an RGB SSD. They've got three versions available, so the USB gives off a rainbow wave, while the 5-volt and the 12-volt are able to be configured with a variety of RGB software. They've got read and write speeds of up to 560 megabytes per second, and, this is pretty cool, if you click the link below, you can enter a giveaway, and the winner can choose either a 500GB Delta RGB SSD or their T-Force RGB 16GB RAM kit. Go, go, go, go, go. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, then I see you, NVIDIA employees. I see you. But if you liked it, you can hit the like button, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. 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