 I am recording now, please go. So the core thing about G-Sync that they're touting here is the ability that lets you get away from completely isochronous or fixed time slices for your games. Now time slices have been with us for the 50 years since television when you've got, you had to refresh the screen in these continuous patterns because the light from the phosphors just decayed, it went away. With backlit LCD displays, the light's continuous there so there is no sensible reason why we have to be doing that. And because we are, we get these artifacts of either tear or judder. So it's really good to get away from that. Now if you try for a high frame rate, like 60 frames per second, which I've been a big proponent of, if you miss, it hurts really bad. You drop all the way down to 30 frames per second. While with something like G-Sync, if you take 17 milliseconds instead of 16 milliseconds, nobody can even tell. It just comes out as a tiny delay on the frame and that's a wonderful thing. So that's one real advantage. If you're trying hard for a frame rate, it makes your inevitable miss imperceptible. If you're not even trying, if you're just making a game that's randomly running at whatever the hell frame rate it turns out, it magically works out on this. If you're going between 20 and 80 frames per second, like a lot of games will if they're unconstrained there, this makes that beneficial. It means that it's smooth at 20, but then at 80 it's silky. And this is a really great thing. Now the interesting tension that we've got here is that I didn't really appreciate this a year ago, but the persistence on a display, the fact that it is continuously illuminated, contributes to a lot of subtle blurring effects on the screen. When you look at like a text, you know, like a webpage, if you pan it across the screen smoothly or if you scroll like an iPad or something, even if it's scrolling at a perfect 60 frames per second smoothness, it's hard to read because it feels blurred in the direction that it's moving. And that is a consequence of the persistence, the fact that it's continuously illuminated. The solution to that is to only illuminate it very briefly. Now this happened automatically for CRT displays. As the electron beam scanned over, you only had, you know, microseconds of illumination from that before it went away. And there's a cadre of people that would talk about like sports broadcasting where they'd complain it's never been the same since you've got flat panels because everything is a little bit more smeared on the pans. I never really noticed that so much, but in a head mounted display, it is night and day. It is one of the more dramatic technology demos that you can do to have a display that you can switch between low persistence and full persistence. It's a big deal. Now the interesting thing is in the last couple of years, Nvidia has had their light boost technology for the 3D vision stuff and you could put that in, you could use that as a low persistence monitor. People wrote firmware hacks to be able to do this. So if you made 120 Hertz game and Doom 3 BFG was one of the few things that, because it's an old game and we paid a little bit of attention, you could run it at 120 frames per second locked and you could put it into a mode like this and it was pretty awesome. But no modern game runs at 120 frames per second, let alone stereo for a head mounted display because right now people will just say, I'm a 30 Hertz game and why bother? And even if you try for 60, you know, that's enough blood, sweat and tears to get there. Pushing further beyond is hard, but G-Sync makes it a smooth continuum. So every bit that you do to help helps. You know, it is better to be at 70 than to 60, it's better to be at 40 than 30. This is a good thing. And I think that this will be a path that can start bringing some games up. Now we've got the other tension of like 4K displays. It's like, okay, let's go back down to 30 frames per second to do a 4K display. But at least there's the option of possibly pushing up because once you get over 90, 95 Hertz, ideally up to 120 or 144, some of these monitors will run at, you can start doing this low persistence stuff. But the problem with this, and this is an interesting tension, if you do the low persistence and you vary your frame rate, then it changes the intensity of what you're looking at. So what needs to happen is you need to vary the length of the illumination based on how long the frame rate was. Now G-Sync can do all of these things. They actually, they didn't want us to really talk about this aspect of G-Sync because they thought it would confuse the, you know, the people listening. But I actually think that's pretty important where it's got the low persistence option. Right now it's binary. You can go to 120 Hertz and be low persistence, or you can be at variable frame rate. But there's no reason why this can't be combined where you start adapting one towards the other. Then you get this option where the best world, the best case of this would be the game is running, if it's running at 20, 30 frames per second, it's full persistence. It's just variable. But as the game creeps up and it gets over 90 frames per second, then it can start adapting the backlight to it. And that'd be great. So you might have a game where only in some simple scenes are you at low persistence wonderfulness while in your massive outdoor exploding everything, then it's falling down as full persistence. But that would be great. It's making things better where they can be better. And there's a lot of other uses for this type of thing. Like I had mentioned Android specifically because I did complain that you take the, like the Nvidia Shield where it's got, should have plenty of horsepower, but if you play Sonic on it, it drops frames every now and then. And that's not the fault of the GPU or the CPU. It's the fault largely of the power management and what happens on Android where they're constantly trying to save power by adapting the core count and the frequencies on these things. And unfortunately what happens is they often pull the power down until you start dropping frames, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. So we could fight that by saying, well, we want a dedicated amount of core cores and frequency, but then you waste power where really the optimal thing would be let them manage the power as they do now and use variable refresh technology to just mean when you slightly miss it will be imperceptible if you go to 17 milliseconds for your frame instead of 15 there. And that will be a great thing. But even Nvidia's knows that even though they own that platform, it's going to be integrating with another display vendor, pushing things through, integrating with more Android stack. These are hard cross company issues and Nvidia, it's great that Nvidia did this. I've been harping on this for a number of years, but it took something, a company like Nvidia that can change GPUs and they can change the hardware, they can write the drivers for it, that can leverage the display vendors to actually put something like this in. It could have happened five years ago. It would have been good to happen five years ago, but it's finally happening now. Well, that's fantastic. Thank you very much. I'm sure everyone appreciated you taking the time. I would offer to shake your hand and thank you, but I'm pretty burdened here right now. Okay. All right. I'm going to intercept Tim Sweeney. Hey, Tim. Can I borrow you for just a couple of minutes just to basically say hi to the viewers? Sure. Okay. I am going to have to... Okay. This is very challenging. Okay. But can you kind of reach past me here? Do you see channel one where there's an A and an M? Yeah. Can you switch that to A? Then same with channel two. So there you guys have it. Tim Sweeney touched my camera. So we've got about 3,000 viewers on here right now that are watching live. So if... You know what? I guess probably the most appropriate thing given that we're at Nvidia's event is can you talk a little bit about G-Sync and how important you think it is? Oh, sure. It is a really important piece of technology. It enables games running at any frame rate to have the smoothness that you get from running at a constant frame rate. Right now, to achieve 60 frames, the second perfect smoothest, you have to make great sacrifices in a game. And if you just go one frame below it to 59, then suddenly your game is interrupted by these massive stutters. And the G-Sync tech really creates a continuum so that whatever level of frames the game is outputting can be displayed smoothly and without these crazy artifacts that you have in games nowadays. It means game developers will be able to create really awesome levels of content and still achieve the sort of smoothness that you get in games like Call of Duty, for example. I mean, one of the things that the average person, I think, really doesn't understand is they're quick to blame any kind of a frame rate issue on, well, the game optimization isn't very good. Can you talk a little bit about the delicate balancing act that you guys go through to deliver both great level of detail and a smooth gaming experience? Sure. It's a constant trade-off for a game developer. With Gears of War, for example, we aimed at creating the most impressive visual experience we could while trying to hit 30 frames a second pretty consistently. But once in a while, there's a moment when the game drops below that, and it really impacts the quality because you're not dropping to 29 or 28 frames a second. You're jittering back and forth between 20 and 30, and it's just really bad. This makes it much easier to develop games that have a high level of smoothness, and that's going to mean a lot more games will be smooth in the future. It's one of those kind of magical technologies that you don't necessarily look at the screen and recognize exactly what's going wrong. It just looks wrong, and it looks jittery and unrealistic for reasons that are hard to identify, but when you see it working perfectly, it's an entirely different experience. So in your mind, would we see something akin to G-Sync on handhelds, televisions, along with PC monitors? How far out do you see that in the future? How much would you love to have this on the console? We'd love to have this everywhere. Televisions, projectors, mobile LCD displays, it's going to be especially important for products like Oculus where you want to have a very high and consistent frame rate for fast response time. This technology, it's starting like almost everything. It's an innovation in the industry. It's starting on high-end PC, and it will work its way throughout the rest of the industry over the coming years. All right. Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time. I know that you're supposed to be up here for the panel, but I appreciate you just taking the time to say hi to the viewers. And I would shake your hand, but if nothing else, I'm going to try and have like a photo op sort of there. You know, that's the best we were able to do. Thank you so much for taking the time. So there you guys go. Have you forgiven the enforcer now? The enforcer's not a bad guy. Because he helped us sync up with Tim Sweeney. So there you go. Are you the enforcer? Yeah, that's what they call me now. There's Tim over there, actually. He wandered away from us over to the G-Sync demo. You can see he's got his face about four inches from the screen. OK, maybe we're not going to leave him alone just yet. OK, just for fun, we're going to bother you again here. You're playing around with the demo right now, correct? Yes. Yes. This has three modes, the V-Sync, No V-Sync, and G-Sync. Of course, in a video of this, you are not going to see any of what I'm talking about. But the difference in smoothness is really impressive. With V-Sync, you don't see tearing artifacts, but you do see an inconsistency with the frame rate consistently jittering back and forth between one frame rate and another because of the way that the frame rates are discretized. Well, I never knew what was wrong. V-Sync always felt off to me. I never liked it. Well, it's subtle. So you turn off V-Sync, and you have a different set of errors, which is that each scan line is independently experiencing its own discretization. But now you're getting this tearing where half of the screen is the previous frame and half of the screen is the next frame, wherever arbitrarily in time the change hit. And then with G-Sync, it's always looking at the right time. It's displaying frames at a consistent rate, and so you get a lack of jittering artifacts. And look, here the frame rate is varying. Here in places it's dropping probably even below, well, it's definitely around 30 frames a second. But this smooth dropping from 60 down to 30 is much, much less disturbing than dropping frames one at a time. And what you're looking at right now looks like a very extreme example. It looks like the first thing Tim did when he got here was crank the frame time minimums all the way down and the maximums all the way up. Or was it already like that when you got here? No, I did this. This is really the worst case. So the way the demo's running here, let me show you this, guys. So it's mayhem in a multiplayer game where there are enormous numbers of players just causing crazy spikes in frame time all the time. But here with G-Sync, you won't appreciate it in this video because it's a video of a screen with a different display resolution and sampling rate. But it's just, it is flawless to the point where there's this little text on the spinning pendulum and you can actually read it, which is astonishing because if you go turn off G-Sync, then it's tearing, it makes it hard, it's distracting your eye away from it. It's making a really big quantitative difference. Very cool. Okay, thank you. We really will stop bothering you now. Thank you. So guys, I mean, you would never really see... Okay, so the way the demo's set up for minimum and maximum frame times, so it's kind of swinging between 60 and 30, and that really does present a very worst case scenario. I mean, that's kind of like an artificial situation where you're looking down at something intensive like a scene with a bunch of stuff exploding and then swinging your camera up to the ceiling and then back down and then back up and then back down and back up and you're trying to make the experience disconcerting. And that's the worst case scenario that we're kind of looking at over there. And even then, it's pretty darn smooth. Someone says G-Sync will... Somehow adoption will affect it. It doesn't. G-Sync will affect the people who buy the gear that runs it. You don't have to wait for any industry adoption other than making sure that there are monitors that have the technology built into them, which NVIDIA is saying will be available as early as Q1 next year. So it will be up to the individual to adopt it and enjoy it, and that's that. It will work on any game. It will work on any Kepler-based GPU, and it will work on any G-Sync-enabled monitor. And you don't have to wait for game developers to enable anything. You don't have to wait for anything else to happen. Okay, my last question is, you guys talk about how you'll be able to develop games differently if you don't have to target a particular frame rate using a technology like G-Sync. But with G-Sync, we're going to be looking at a very small initial user base because it's based on a Kepler GPU and a particular monitor that has a particular hardware chip in it. Hello, Chris DeVaul again. So is this within the next five years that you'll be able to actually forget about a target frame rate with a game and assume that the end user can experience it the way that G-Sync can deliver the game? I think this is going to be pretty broadly picked up because this is not like it doubles the size of the die of something to do this. It's not that expensive of a technology. I have no idea what the media's licensing costs are going to be on here, but this is something that should be broadly adopted. From a pure technology standpoint, this is just the right thing. And obviously in early years, this is just going to be a smoothness benefit for people. But in the space of five years or something, I would hope something like this is pretty much unique. Absolutely. You also, there's a limited amount of things a monitor manufacturer or a TV manufacturer can actually compete on. Once you have 14 pixels... They put in stupid things in a lot of cases. This is actually a good thing. Please remove the sharpening, the edge detection, and the motion compensation and actually add this and 14 pixels would be nice also and 120 or more. I think there will be, when people actually see the plays you guys have been doing and more and more people see that, there will actually be a lot of movement in the overall industry to transition to something like this really quite quickly. And that's what I'm hoping for because then we can actually just say target games more specifically for this. Yeah, exactly. The rest of the industry needs to hardware up. Every display device, every platform including the mobile platforms, we need to adopt this kind of technology over the next few years because it's visually striking. It doesn't show up in a TV commercial but to any player playing the game, it's incredibly apparent the difference in visual quality here. And so it's got to be a major initiative for everybody or else people are going to look at it and say, oh wow, that looks like the last generation. Actually one wish I have there is that while you're going to these retail stores, when they sell tons and tons of TV displays or monitors and you see all of them standing there, really nice monitors, really nice big screen TVs, they look amazing and all of them are set on actually a startup showroom mode that just cranks up all of the colors. I would like to replace that. Remove that mode. Showroom mode does not exist anymore and instead you just have this variable refresh rate and you actually see the difference on that. The false colors, you don't want to have that anyway. That's not calibrated to anything that we actually create. It just creates a completely artificial environment plus all the other shit that you do there to support legacy content. Well said. It looks like we're going to be here for a little while longer. Can we take a bathroom break? Absolutely. So by the way, is there, logistics wise, I think it's 2.30. Hey guys, just one second. This is Jensen. Hey John, don't film. Hold it for just a second. It turns out I've got to go catch a flight. I didn't want to take off without thanking you guys properly. You guys not only made the show, made the launch. You guys made our year. It is quite a privilege to have you guys anywhere but to have the three of you guys in the same place at the same time and having this kind of access to you guys is really, really a privilege. It's a privilege for me. I know it's a privilege for everybody in the audience and it's just so much fun to listen to you guys. I want to thank you guys for everything you've done for the game industry but not just the game industry, for the computer industry, the technology industry and just good old fashioned human beings in general. I think you guys are fantastic. I love you guys. I love your friendship and love your partnership. Thanks for everything. Thank you. 4K vs. G-Sync. What is more important to gaming? G-Sync. Yeah, I mean at this point we'll always be able to suck up to the G-Sync. But right now people migrate to 4K and they get much lower frame rates on the experience. I think the trade-off is already a little bit south of optimal by what people are making now and quadrupling down on that. I don't think, while the G-Sync will just make everything somewhat better. So whatever you do is G-Sync? You don't want to go back to anything else? Well, I've got the whole issue about the low persistence displays that I have to deal with and the head mounted display systems. But I think that for a conventional desktop monitor I really want to see this just absolutely ridiculous. The good news is it doesn't have to be more there either. It's a shame that those 4K monitors back there are not G-Sync because you see them juttering and tearing and exactly the problems we've been talking about now. It's actually mostly object-less in there and it's a shame that we don't have those G-Sync. We're working on it. SC4K is kind of a workstation application for the next few years. In that time frame we'll be using it as monitors for building games because we don't have a huge complex tool open. Photographers will be using it for their work. Videographers. Lots of people will be using it but I don't think it's the right output resolution for rendering until your GPU is significantly faster at consumer levels. Once that 28 teraflops is in a single GPU costing 300 bucks, that's when you want to go 4K. It's when you can sustain 30 to 60 to 90 frames a second. Actually, just to pull up on that, the environment where I work just on my own desk, it essentially has a 4-thread mode with a 4-inch screen and a 4K screen next to that. They're putting them in half circle around you. It's actually a really good work environment, work space. Having a single 4K screen that's curved and 50-inch or something like that would actually replace more of my screens and would be an amazing work environment for that. I could definitely play games in an extremely immersive way. You're starting to see these curved screens and that size. G-Sync on it and based on the 120-Hz, perfect gaming and perfect work. While we're at it, I want spherical section screens so that everything focuses properly and that's all I have.