One way to avoid motion blur on a gaming monitor is to speed up the rate at which pixels transition to different values. We PC gamers know this. We are constantly chasing lower response times and higher refresh rates. But according to Nvidia, there is another important factor that causes motion blur on monitors. Our eyes retain information that flashes before our eyes, causing blurring, and the only way to get rid of this is to strobe the monitor's backlight.

Recall the ultra-low motion blur. However, Nvidia combines the two to achieve an all-purpose blur prevention technique in G-Sync Pulsar, which Nvidia says was specifically designed to provide a more advanced strobing technique that works in conjunction with variable refresh rate technology.

I just saw the G-Sync Pulsar at their booth at CES 2024. The Nvidia employee who demonstrated it to us was running Counter-Strike 2 on a high refresh rate gaming monitor. First of all, Pulsar is disabled. They were instructed to pay particular attention to the display name above the player character, which was barely legible when the character was moved back and forth on the screen.

With a flick of the switch, the pulsar was turned on and the name tag was clearly and quite visible. Similarly, as the player/character ran back and forth, the details became apparent.

Apparently, the Nvidia employee had been hitting A and D all day.

So what's really going on?" According to Nvidia, there's a lot to it, but it essentially boils down to two things: adaptive overdrive and pulse modulation. Fortunately, I don't have to remember the conversation verbatim; she referred me to a blog post that helps summarize it all. But here are the basics.

Adaptive overdrive "dynamically adjusts the rate at which pixels transition from one color to another." It should be adaptive to the range of speeds the monitor/PC may perform.

The second part is pulse modulation. This effectively controls the duration and brightness of the strobe backlight to reduce flickering, essentially adjusting the strobe to match a variable refresh rate.

You can see the pulsar in action in the video in the blog post. I took a video of myself with my cell phone, but it is of little use as it does not capture the high frame rate or detail. The only way to see it in action is to see it in person.

According to Nvidia, Pulsar delivers "motion clarity that is effectively four times the baseline refresh rate." This is a big claim, but in my experience it certainly helps resolve crisp images. I have seen a demo made to show off this technology and would love to see how this translates to more games.

The only thing to note is that this requires a G-Sync chip in the monitor. In other words, you will need a G-Sync Ultimate monitor to enable this. It also appears that the monitor must specifically support Pulsar; the Asus ROG Swift PG27 series G-Sync is the first monitor to support Pulsar and will be available later this year.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.