I recently reinstalled windows on my pc, and looked at pcmr on reddit to find a post of someone complaining about gsync, on nvidia systems, not beeing enabled by default everywhere.
That reminded me the pain it is to help someone enable it, with an ugly and hard to understand (for noobs) nvidia tutorial, and even worse with a freesync display.
On my system, with an amd card, and a freesync premium display, once the drivers were installed, freesync was enabled and no issues, nothing do fiddle with, it was just enabled automatically for all the system and windows to use.
Wonder why nvidia can’t do that.
It even set automatically my display to 165hz (tho maybe that could have been because it already was at 165 before the reinstall?).
There is still the trick to lower the max fps 3/4fps lower than the max hz of the display to teach, for better smoothness. But that is just an easy to do trick.
I switched from Nvidia to AMD about a year ago. I was worried because everyone harps on AMD drivers, but they’re pretty solid imo. I have yet to have an issue with them, and I’d say that I even prefer them at this point!
Things were hairy around the first Navi release (5XXX series), but they’ve really improved reliability and resilience since then.
I just checked, it’s 5 (or 6 if it’s not your main display) clicks to enable gsync, nothing hard.
- Click on “show hidden icons” (bottom right thingy in the taskbar to roll out list with NV control panel, idk how it is called)
- Click on Nvidia control panel
- Click on setup gsync from the left list from display group (another click to select the correct screen possibly)
- Click on enable gsync at the top
- Click apply and you are done. Compared to setting up lightboost on screens that officially only support it in 3D this is simple.
For tech illiterate people, the difficulty of a task is not measured by the number of clicks it takes. Literally the first step you listed is enough to lose most people on their first PC.
Tech illiterate people are screwed either way because windows will leave their high refresh rate screens at 60Hz (unless something has changed).