At CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Nvidia announced a new certification program that will allow FreeSync monitors that pass the tests to benefit from G-Sync technology. In addition to very tight certification parameters, we found that FreeSync G-Sync certified monitors are not compatible with GeForce GTX 900 graphics cards.
This is reflected in the latest version of the NVIDIA drivers, the GeForce 417.71 WHQL, released by the company a few days ago, which only ensures compatibility with GeForce GTX 1000 and GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics cards.
At the moment we don’t know exactly what the reason for this decision is, but at least some ideas have come to mind:
- Nvidia wants to make sure that monitors that weren’t developed for G-Sync technology from the beginning have acceptable performance, and that’s only possible with the last two generations of GPUs.
- Nvidia wants to avoid further stimulating the market for used 900 series GPUs and forcing users to buy a newer GPU.
Let us be clear that these two possibilities are our thoughts and that they are not based on any data, but only on perceptions. However, we hope to learn more in the next few days.