Leak: NVIDIA GTX Titan Supports GPU Boost 2.0 and "80Hz" Adaptive Vsync

Today, we brought you leaked slides of the new GTX Titan graphics card, showing how it regains the single GPU performance crown for NVIDIA and then some. In this article, we bring you leaked slides explaining a little more about two new featues of this graphics card, GPU Boost 2.0 and 80Hz adaptive vsync. Note that there's not that much to go on at this point, only the two slides below, which only tell us the bare minimum.

Firstly, the previous GPU Boost used in the GTX 680 basically equates to running the GPU at the highest clock speed possible while keeping it within its electrical and thermal specifications. It does this by boosting the clock speed depending on GPU load and graphical demand, all the while keeping the chip within its Thermal Design Power (TDP). Now, GPU Boost 2.0 enhances the performance of the GPU by more agressively boosting the clock speed over the previous version. Apparently, it does this by monitoring just temperature instead, which allows the voltage and hence clock to be boosted from the previous "Vrel" level to the new "Vrelnew" level, thus allowing for a faster clock speed, as shown in the diagram below.



Next up we have the new "80Hz" adaptive vsync, which is supposed to give a frame rate boost over the previous "60Hz" version. However, how it's supposed to do this isn't at all clear when one understands how vsync works in the first place and the slide below really doesn't help much.



First off, there's no "60Hz" version of vsync. Every monitor will run at a particular refresh rate, nowadays usually 60Hz for most LCD displays, but also at a doubled 120Hz with gamer and 3D video (eg NVIDIA 3D Vision) oriented displays, which leads to much smoother video animation, since it has twice the temporal resolution, leading to finer motion steps between each frame.

All vsync, including adaptive vsync does, is lock the frame rate of the graphics card to that of the display, with the adaptive version allowing the graphics card to run unlocked when frame rendering speed is below the monitor's refresh rate in order to deliver less stuttery video when the system can't maintain the monitor's refresh rate. Note that the whole point of having a high end system, especially the graphics card, is to avoid those frame rate drops, since smooth video is only achieved when the graphics card's frame rate output is synced to the monitor's refresh rate and it renders every single frame. Anything else leads to judder (also known as stutter) hitches and possibly screen tearing which crucially, looks crap.

With that in mind, the above slide seems to suggest something about the graphics card rendering at 90fps, but displaying at 80fps on the monitor and yet somehow increasing frame rate. This makes no sense, as it's not possible to display a higher frame rate than the refresh rate of the monitor.

Also, 80fps would equate to 80Hz refresh on the monitor, which is a very uncommon refresh rate and one not normally likely to be found in the driver control panel when setting the refresh rate. It's not clear whether this means that the graphics card continues to render above the monitor refresh rate, yet displays video at the monitor's refresh rate, but eliminates tearing by having some kind of partial vsync, perhaps? Never mind, all will be revealed when NVIDIA officially launches the new graphics card within the next 24 hours.

HardOCP has a great in-depth explanation of how adaptive vsync works, here.

Source: Egypthardware via WCCFtech.