 Welcome to a special Linus Tech Tips episode about adaptive v-sync. So this is all about the technology that makes GeForce cards that feature adaptive v-sync pretty much the best thing ever for LCD users. So back when we were all using CRTs and we were lucky to get 30 to 40 FPS in our games and CRTs at the high end were capable of 75 to 85 Hz, we didn't worry too much about the frame rate going over the refresh rate of the monitor. So to be clear, the frame rate is how many frames per second or FPS or images per second the video card could potentially output to a display device. In this case you can see our frame rate is around 150 FPS in Battlefield 3 staring at a wall. This is with a 660 Ti. Refresh rate is how many images the screen can draw in a second. So this is a pretty fast monitor. This is a 120 Hz monitor. For 60 Hz monitor users this is going to be even more of an issue because you're much more likely to have these out of sync. So 120 and 150. What that means is this video card is feeding this 150 images and this monitor is displaying only 120 of them. So what that means is while the video card is in the middle of changing from this position, actually here, let's do it this way, from something being in this position to this position, the monitor might pick up half of this one and half of this one and you get this disjointedness between where the images split called tearing. So tearing only occurs when the frame rate goes above the refresh rate. This is an extreme example of tearing. This is not an artifact. This is us looking at something and seeing that tearing. So you can actually also see it in the line here. I don't know if you guys are going to be able to see that very well, but you can see it gets quite distorted and quite crappy. So you can see like it breaks up like this. So the way to combat tearing is to turn on V-sync or vertical sync. What that does is it locks your frame rate at the refresh rate of your monitor. The problem with V-sync is that when you get into an action packed scenario, V-sync has to keep the refresh rate, or rather the frame rate, at an even, crap I always forget, is it factor? Whatever the thing, it has to multiply out to the refresh rate of the monitor. So if you run into like a firefight and you would have normally dipped to 110 FPS, it'll actually knock you all the way down to 60 and then all the way down to 30 and all the way down to 15 until it reaches one where you can keep that sustained frame rate. So what we're going to do is we're going to show you how adaptive V-sync gives you the best of both worlds. Whenever you're going to be running too high, V-sync will automatically turn on and whenever you're going to be running too low or below that refresh rate, V-sync will turn off, which will allow you to run at 110 or 100 FPS rather than knocking you all the way down to 60 and giving you that difference. So we're going to turn on adaptive V-sync and we're going to come back and look at this wall and show you what a difference it makes to the tearing-ness that goes on. You can change this in the manage 3D settings of your Nvidia control panel. So we're going vertical sync instead of using the 3D application setting, we're going to go with adaptive. Yay! Adaptive V-sync! Alright, let's fire up our game again and see if this actually works. I don't know if it will. It looks like we're going to have to restart our game here. Slick thought it might work but I thought he was wrong and it looks like I was right. Alright so here we go. We have adaptive V-sync on which means you can see that we're pinned at 120 FPS which means that after we chop this thing, ha ha, no tearing artifacts. See that? That is what it is supposed to look like without all of those lines. Same thing, if we look back and forth on these pillars we're not going to see that horrible separation. Now let's go find ourselves a firefight and let's see what happens to the frame rate. So as soon as we drop below 120 FPS, instead of knocking us all the way down to 60, we should be able to achieve like 119 or 117 or 115. So there you go. That is adaptive V-sync. It means we don't have to deal with bull crap tearing which looks terrible and is very very distracting because you can have the most beast machine in the world and it's almost the more beast of a machine you buy, the more susceptible you are to this horrible visual anomaly. And so we don't have to deal with that and we don't have to deal with dipping all the way down to 60 FPS which I personally can tell the difference between 60 and 120. Whatever you people who think that you can't tell the difference, you guys are just totally wrong and I'm sorry. But get a better machine and get a better monitor and you will understand. So I don't have to suffer with 60 or 30 FPS but I don't have to deal with tearing. So it's like the best thing ever. Thank you Nvidia for bringing us adaptive V-sync which you can see continuing to work here as we watch these frame rates move all over the place and do what they do. You're going to play me some Battlefield 3 now. I actually kind of like this mouse. I haven't tried it before. See him storm something or other. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.