AMD’s FreeSync and NVIDIA’s G-Sync aims to deliver the same thing to gamers: to eliminate screen tearing on video games. Sounds like a noble pursuit right? The only caveat is that AMD’s FreeSync only works on AMD GPUs while NVIDIA’s G-Sync only works on NVIDIA cards. Although FreeSync is essentially an improved version of VESA’s free Adaptive Sync, there is still no way for FreeSync to work on an NVIDIA card until now.
A redditor via the handle “survate” has discovered a work around to allow FreeSync to work on NVIDIA cards using a combination of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, and AMD 2200G APU, a standard non-FreeSync monitor, and a FreeSync monitor.
In order for the trick to work, survate plugged the FreeSync monitor to the motherboard that houses the APU while the non-FreeSync monitor was connected to the NVIDIA GPU. The redditor also made the APU the primary graphics adapter via the BIOS.
Survate has also made the FreeSync monitor plugged to his GTX 1060 the primary monitor. The final procedure is to allow programs to use the NVIDIA card, which can be done in the NVIDIA Control Panel. Since the FreeSync monitor is the primary monitor, games would most likely run on the FreeSync monitor. If a program launched via the secondary monitor, users would need to go to windowed mode and transfer the program to the FreeSync monitor and maximize the application.
According to survate, Batman Arkham Knight and AMD’s FreeSync Windmill Demo was able to work just fine using this workaround. survate says that this trick is also theoretically possible with a multi-GPU setup: one with a FreeSync compatible card and another NVIDIA card.
Though not practical, this work around allows users with an NVIDIA GPU and an AMD APU or GPU to utilize FreeSync via the NVIDIA card. We won’t be hoping for NVIDIA to fully support FreeSync in the near future and survate’s fix would probably be patched out from a future driver update from NVIDIA.
Source: Reddit
