The topic Nvidia G-Sync Pulsar monitors can successfully beat biology to hone motion clarity… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Back when I first tried a G-Sync Pulsar monitor at an Nvidia shindig in February, I clung to the hope that maybe, finally, gaming display tech had made its first real breakthrough in years. Dozens, if not hundreds of samey screens would be revealed as incompetent fools in the searing light of Pulsar’s innovative genius; Nvidia’s own frame generation systems would weep in shame that they once tried to mock up the fluidity and motion clarity that Pulsar could deliver for real.
Now, I have one such Pulsar monitor – an identical 1440p, 360Hz Asus ROG Strix XG27AQNGV to the one from that demo – to test at length, and can at last say with certainty: yeah, s’alright. Pretty decent. Doesn’t make much of a difference in some games but it can look quite nice. Probably too expensive, mind. Why can’t I hear any weeping?
To quickly recap what G-Sync Pulsar is and how it works, it’s basically a smarter version of the backlight strobing technique that certain LCD monitors use the reduce perceived blur. I say perceived because this specific type of blur, called sample and hold, only really exists in our eyes and brains: when we see a series of static images, flashed through quickly to give the impression of motion, we tend to ‘imagine’ a blur effect to fill in the transitions between those images. Because this is exactly how game rendering works, with one static frame onscreen at a time, we perceive a degree of blurring even at higher framerates.
Conventional backlight strobing aims to circuit-break our sickening weakness of the flesh by briefly disabling and re-enabling the screen’s backlight between image refreshes, just long enough to interrupt pixel persistence and convince our brains that there’s no need to muck up motion clarity with extra blur. This cure has heaps of side-effects, though, from forcing a lower overall brightness to incompatibility with variable refresh rate (VRR) tech like Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, both of which help deal with ugly screen tearing. Worst of all, backlight strobing – in this form – can introduce a visible flickering effect, spoiling the image entirely.
G-Sync Pulsar aims for the same blur-busting outcome, but without any of those catches. It splits the screen up into vertically-stacked zones and only strobes them one at a time, avoiding the full-screen refresh that’s prone to flickering. It’s also compatible with G-Sync, as you probably guessed from the name, and doesn’t need a dingy max brightness to operate; I clocked this XG27AQNGV peaking at a radiant 578cd/m2 with Pulsar enabled. The result, ideally, is that your games’ visual details are much better preserved in motion, while also maintaining the luminance and anti-tear standards you’d expect from any proper gaming monitor.
There are still some tradeoffs. Pulsar needs a GeForce RTX graphics card to function, and currently only operates within the 76-360fps range, so if your PC drops to 75fps or lower, you may end up seeing some unintentional flickering after all. It’s also specifically for LCD/IPS monitors, as more contrast-rich OLED panels don’t really use backlighting as such. But it’s an encouraging example of something that’s become unfortunately rare in PC hardware circles, namely identifying a specific, existing problem and trying to solve it, rather than circling back every year with a lightly improvements and a couple more RGB strips.
This was evident as I was zooming the camera over Anno 117’s Roman townships in February, and while the extent of the upgrade varies by game, it’s still apparent now. Returning to the school of top-down views, I fired up Dota 2 for a side-by-side comparison on two PCs: one hooked up to the ROG Strix XG27AQNGV, the other to my old LG UltraGear 27GL850-B, with a 144fps cap on the former so both would run at identical framerates. Sure enough, sliding the camera around – thus shifting trees, river banks and character models around the screen – muddled the details on the 27GL850-B, while the XG27AQNGV’s motion appeared sharper and cleaner. Especially so on the maps’s foliage, which appeared so clearly-defined in motion that it almost seemed to emerge from out of the screen, like a no-glasses 3D effect.
I saw something similar in Forza Horizon 6, where passing trees and bushes kept much more distinct, leafy outlines on the XG27AQNGV than on the 27GL850-B. This was with a minor framerate disadvantage for the Asus monitor as well, as the closest framerate cap option available to the 27GL850-B’s 144fps limit was not, weirdly, 144fps, but 120fps. In other words, the Pulsar screen was showing 24 fewer frames per second and still made in-motion objects look better.
Fearful of the Benchmark Police getting wind of my not-quite-even comparison, I also remembered that Pulsar is a setting that can be turned on or off at will – even while keeping the anti-tearing benefits of regular G-Sync. I therefore removed FH6’s framerate cap and checked how it looked at the full 360Hz, just on the XG27AQNGV, both with and without Pulsar enabled. This time, the difference wasn’t quite as visible – which makes sense, given a higher framerate will naturally improvement motion clarity regardless – but Pulsar still made a slight improvement, (again) mostly around finer environmental details like foliage.
Counter-Strike 2 seemed like another good test bed, considering how well its hyper-twitchiness pairs well with fast, sharp monitors. Here, however, I wasn’t getting as visible an upgrade. After a spell of 200fps+ deathmatching with the XG27AQNGV’s Pulsar capabilities switched off, I flicked it back on, and honestly had to squint to see the difference. There’s was maybe, possibly a very mild improvement to motion clarity when rapidly making big, off-the-screen aim adjustments, but nothing that would make the difference between victory and corpsehood.
The same was true of my personal go-to sweatshooter, Apex Legends, where Pulsar failed to make a tangible impact – even after I swapped my test PC’s RTX 5080 for a weedier RTX 4060, almost halving framerates from 300fps to around 160fps. It was possible to engineer cases where a microscopic clarity advantage was evident with Pulsar, usually by shaking the mouse like a particularly watery ketchup bottle, but there wasn’t much difference in normal playing conditions. And Hollow Knight: Silksong, admittedly not lacking in smoothness to begin with, didn’t benefit in the slightest.
Results will vary, then, and vary wildly. Pulsar isn’t even very consistent in its relationship with framerates, as while its effect was more impressive at (relatively speaking) lower frames-per-secondseses in Forza, it looked much better in my final test game, Cities: Skylines 2, when it was running faster. At around 80fps, just high enough to creep into Pulsar’s effective range, Skylines 2 still showed a dash of ghosting when sliding the camera around, but dropping some quality settings to get up to 110fps was enough to keep building details and greenery installations looking sharp and detail-rich in the same motions. Either way, it should be noted, both instances significantly cut down on the blur I saw when switching Pulsar off. Maybe it just really likes god’s-eye-view games?
This lack of an always-visible upgrade is a blunting blow to Pulsar’s appeal, though would it be overly credulous to say I still quite like it? When it works, it really does feel like an advance has been made, and frankly, with more success than some of Nvidia’s purely GPU-based attempts at making framerates look higher than they are. I’d use Pulsar to polish up my games over DLSS frame generation any day – the initial promise of the latter has been largely dulled by game misuse and the lack of an answer to its input lag problem, with Nvidia trapping themselves in a neverending 4x, 5x, 6x multiplier race where pursuit of bigger numbers is only making the end results worse. The second-worst thing about Pulsar is that I’d need to keep my games running above 75fps, something I’ve spent thousands of pounds and years of career trying to do anyway.
The first-worst thing, unfortunately, is that Pulsar represents yet another fat hardware spend. The ROG Strix XG27AQNGV is currently £629, and although there are cheaper options, the least financially devastating Pulsar model in the UK is still £550. You can get a bigger, 4K resolution, still-abundantly-fast 240Hz OLED monitor for that kind of money, and while Pulsar benefits a little from the lack of more direct competition – 1440p screens that reach 360Hz are gold dust – it ain’t hard to find a Quad HD display at 240Hz that comes in under £200.
These first-gen Pulsar monitors do at least give you something unique for your money, and as a proof of concept, they show that the tech can impress outside of Nvidia’s own test environments. I, however, will be clinging to a new hope: that the brains behind Pulsar can figure out both how to get it shining in a wider range of games, and how to slip it into monitors that the rest of us can afford.
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