 Our coverage of CES 2019 is brought to you by dbrand. The dbrand grip case is super grippy and protects your phone and their prism screen protectors Well those protect your screen and they're pretty darn impressive. Check them out at the link below. Five years ago Nvidia announced their G-Sync variable refresh rate gaming technology, which promised to eliminate two persistent bugbears of PC gaming stutter and tearing. That is as long as you were willing to pay a significant premium to the tune of 200 to 300 dollars for your display and of course, it was only available to gamers with GeForce graphics cards. Well today or rather, I should say January 15th when the driver drops that all changes. Okay, you'll still need a GeForce graphics card. That's not going to change but Nvidia is finally joining AMD and Intel in supporting Adaptive sync the open variable refresh rate standard that was added to DisplayPort 1.2a three years ago and that is basically exactly what it sounds like so you can take any old Adaptive sync variable refresh rate monitor. So this is one right here from um, Samsung, there we go. You can plug your GeForce graphics card into it, go into the Nvidia driver and boom turn on G-Sync and it gets even better. Nvidia has already gone through literally hundreds of these monitors with the intention of testing every existing Adaptive sync monitor on the market and actually gone as far as to certify the dozen or so of them that they feel meet their standard and enable G-Sync by default as soon as you plug it in and this is at zero cost to both the consumer and the monitor manufacturer. In fact, one of the certified ones was part of AMD's initial wave of free sync compatible displays three years ago. It's crazy, right? Now there's no support for TVs at this time because G-Sync doesn't work over HDMI and also I guess Nvidia's got to sell a handful of these BFGDs once they're finally released later this quarter but they aren't ruling out HDMI support in the future either so we're gonna have to see how that develops. Now, I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, so Linus, what happens then to the original G-Sync with, you know, the module and everything and what about G-Sync HDR? Contrary to what you might think, they are not going away. See, there's one right next to the compatible ones and the non-validated ones. So while Nvidia acknowledges that some of these Adaptive sync displays do deliver a pretty good experience, they have found that the vast majority of them will exhibit undesirable behaviors from ones as obvious as blanking out occasionally to ones that you might not think of like just having a very narrow, oh look at that, bleh, to ones that might just have a very narrow variable refresh rate window that's not actually practical for delivering a good gaming experience. So they maintain that an end-to-end solution all the way from the graphics card to the driver to the display module to the validation of the panel is the best one. So regular G-Sync with the module stays the way it is and G-Sync HDR becomes G-Sync Ultimate and honestly this makes sense to me. When the display has Nvidia's module in it, they're involved in its creation from start to finish working with both the panel and display manufacturers to test and tune every aspect of its image quality and performance and through this process, they can achieve some things that I haven't seen elsewhere like adaptive pixel overdrive across the variable refresh rate range, backlight strobing for very low motion blur with variable refresh rate and very wide adaptive refresh rate windows down to as low as 1 Hertz. I mean nobody actually wants to game at one frame per second, but it's one of those things where like hey if you can do it then why not? But the big question everyone's mind right now has to be why? Why? Why now? Well the marketing spin is we just wanted to make gaming better for gamers everywhere. But okay come on. Now I'm here in the Nvidia booth so this might not be a popular thing to say, but I have a hard time believing that this is some kind of benevolent effort to make gaming as a whole better. I mean if that kind of a monumental shift in Nvidia's business had taken place, I'm sure the Linux gamers, virtualization enthusiasts and folks like us who are trying to save outputless mining cards from ending up in an e-waste pile somewhere would have been the first to notice. Rather what this looks like to me is exactly the sort of shrewd power play that we have come to expect from Nvidia. By opening up monitor support, they are eliminating one of the key reasons that users turn to AMD graphics cards to get variable refresh rate gaming, which when done well really is a better experience without paying the G-Sync tax, which kills the deal in a lot of cases. As for the longer term, Nvidia won't discuss licensing and certification or any other fees that we know exist for current G-Sync branded products like the regular old DisplayPort displays on G-Sync notebooks. But to me this also looks like Nvidia is opening the doors in the future for creating a similar program to what they have on notebooks for certified desktop displays. Now I doubt they're just gonna turn around and start charging for a certification that they just did, and it was a lot of work for free. They generally take a more slow-boil approach from my experience. So here's the way I see it going down. They start taking requests for certification from manufacturers earlier in the process now that everyone knows about it. They reject the ones that aren't good enough. They point at how much better the certified displays are moving out in the market, and then they offer to be more involved in the development process of your monitor next time around for a fee. Now I could be wrong of course and Nvidia could be purely motivated by delivering a better gaming experience to gamers, but the good news is that it actually doesn't matter. Oops, I didn't drop that. I wasn't over there. You didn't drop it. Whatever. The good news is that whatever Nvidia's intention was, this really is a great day for gamers. It really is a better experience. Speaking of better experiences, RCEs coverage is just a better experience with dbrand. dbrand's grip case is super grippy and features Linus proof impact protection in characteristic dbrand fashion. It's got precise cutouts for everything from your fingerprint sensor to your camera, and it's got their trademark super clicky buttons. As for their prism screen protector, this thing is really impressive. It comes with an applicator that makes it easy to get a perfect fit every time. Its feel is very glass-like even though it offers impact protection that simply wouldn't be possible with tempered glass. Like this thing is unbelievable. You can literally take the screen of your phone and hammer a nail into a block of wood. Not that I'm necessarily recommending that you do that. You can peel the prism off and your screen, well mine anyway, okay, your mileage may vary. I don't want to be held liable or whatever. Like don't nail, don't hammer nails in with your phone. But my screen was still in pristine condition. Absolutely unbelievable. So check out the dbrand grip and dbrand prism at the links below. And thanks to dbrand for sponsoring our coverage of CES 2019. Also, thanks to you guys for watching. And make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss any of our coverage here at the show.