LG expands G-Sync Compatibility to its 2020 OLED products across 12 models – CES 2020

Last year, Nvidia announced that it would adopt Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) standards outside of the company’s G-Sync hardware ecosystem. This process brought HDMI 2.1 VRR and VESA Adaptive-Sync to Nvidia’s latest graphics cards, with Nvidia calling rated displays “G-Sync Compatible”, bringing Nvidia verified VRR quality levels to a larger number of screens. 

While this move is very consumer-friendly, it came as a reaction to the VRR being a mandatory part of HDMI 2.1, forcing Nvidia to support non-G-Sync VRR standards. Cynics will see this move as an effort to bring non-Nvidia industry standards under the Nvidia marketing banner, but it cannot be denied that Nvidia’s efforts are pushing display makers to create higher quality VVR monitors and hasten their adoption of VRR standards. 

LG and Nvidia have announced that G-Sync Compatability will be available with twelve of LG’s planned 2020 OLED TVs, all of which will be announced at CES 2020. These screens will range in size from 48-inches to 88-inches, and Nvidia claims that these screens will expand Nvidia’s lineup of Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) to 22 products. These screens are also said to be capable of handling 120Hz refresh rates. 

With regards to Nvidia’s Big Format Gaming Display claims, Nvidia has upped its display count to 22 models by lowering its standards. Nvidia’s original BFGDs shipped with integrated Nvidia Shield TV technology and fully-fledged G-Sync modules, whereas LG’s G-Sync TVs are simply HDMI 2.1 complaint OLED screens with Nvidia certification. 

G-Sync Compatability on LG’s supported OLED screens is only available when using Nvidia’s latest Turing series graphics cards, though it is worth noting that Nvidia’s Turing series cards don’t support HDMI 2.1 fully, just HDMI 2.1’s VRR component. This means that Turing GPUs cannot support 4K 120Hz refresh rates over HDMI.