Determining the best gaming monitor for your setup used to entail narrowing your list down to FreeSync and G-Sync options, depending on your graphics card. That still applies in many cases, though with Nvidia now supporting G-Sync on some FreeSync monitors, it's no longer cut and dry. To help make things easier, MSI shared a list of its own FreeSync displays that it says are compatible.
"Following Nvidia's announcement of their newest drivers, MSI monitors are effectively G-Sync compatible! This technology allows G-Sync to be used on adaptive sync monitors," MSI says.
To be clear, the list is based on MSI's own internal testing, without any apparent participation from Nvidia. We confirmed this with MSI.
Here the ones it says are compatible (as well as a few that are not):
Out of the 19 monitors listed, MSI claims 16 are compatible with G-Sync, and two are not. Quizzically, the remaining monitor—Oculux NXG251R—is a G-Sync display, so we're not sure why MSI included it on the list.
MSI conducted its tests with three different graphics cards, including its own GeForce RTX 2070 Ventus 8G, GeForce RTX 2080 Ventus 8G, and GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming 8G.
We wonder if individual testing will be a trend going forward. If so, things could potentially get confusing. It's also not clear how stringent MSI's own testing is, compared to Nvidia's certification. Out of the 400 monitors Nvidia initially tested, only a dozen received the company's stamp of approval.
"G-Sync compatible testing validates that the monitor does not show blanking, pulsing, flickering, ghosting or other artifacts during VRR gaming. They also validate that the monitor can operate in VRR at any game frame rate by supporting a VRR range of at least 2.4:1 (e.g. 60Hz-144Hz), and offer the gamer a seamless experience by enabling VRR by default," Nvidia explains.
You can find Nvidia's list of G-Sync compatible monitors here.
