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What Is Gsync Pulsar? How Does It Work?
Nvidia Gsync has been around since 2013, and while this variable refresh rate technology was a game changer when it came out, it was expensive and required gaming monitor manufacturers to implement a complicated module to make it work. At CES 2026, though, Nvidia has introduced a new form of Gsync that needs special firmware: Pulsar.
Rather than simply syncing your display’s refresh rate with your game’s frame rate, Pulsar uses strobe backlighting to simulate a much higher refresh rate – up to 1,000Hz, according to Nvidia. The goal is to add more visual smoothness to game motion, something Nvidia has been fixated on since Frame Generation first debuted with the GeForce RTX 4090 in 2022. Is Pulsar more of the same?
What is Gsync?
When Gsync came out, there really wasn’t anything like it. At the time, PC games were notorious for screen tearing, where differences between your refresh rate and frame rate would literally cause a vertical tear in your screen.
Gsync was huge because it eliminated that problem – if you had an Nvidia graphics card – by syncing your refresh rate and your frame rate, eliminating the cause of screen tearing entirely. This was initially possible because Nvidia developed a chip it sold to gaming monitor manufacturers that would act as a liaison between your PC and monitor, making sure everything was synced up. But then, of course, Freesync launched.
AMD’s Freesync billed itself as a direct competitor to Nvidia’s Gsync and had the same goal – syncing refresh rates and frame rates. However, Freesync was at first a little less flexible, only really working within a narrow range of frame rates. The difference was that with Gsync, once the frame rate got down to a certain threshold, the refresh rate of the monitor would change to be double the frame rate, which avoided screen tears.
But eventually, Freesync caught up enough that Nvidia launched the ‘Gsync Compatible’ program, which opened up variable refresh rates on Nvidia graphics cards without needing a gaming monitor with an expensive Gsync module. Then, over time, gaming monitors that were exclusively Gsync started to fade out of relevance.
Over the last few years, even, variable refresh rates have become so common that most gaming monitors are expected to support it, and most TVs and game consoles support it in one way or another.
Perceived Smoothness?
There are two reasons to chase super high frame rates: visual smoothness and lower latency. For the former, the idea is that the quicker frames are sent to the display, the more accurate the display will be at any time. At a high enough frame rate, you can virtually eliminate motion blur, but it’s incredibly hard to do in modern games. So, Nvidia has come up with another solution with Gsync Pulsar.
While it doesn’t really do anything to improve latency or responsiveness, Gsync Pulsar uses a strobing IPS display to improve motion clarity by essentially tricking your eye into thinking something is moving faster. The way Nvidia described it to me was if you have an object moving fast in front of your face, you’re going to naturally perceive some blur. But, if you have that same object disappear and reappear fast enough, it’ll be less blurry. I’m not sure if that actually works, but that is what the strobing backlight is meant to simulate.
Strobing backlights and black frame insertion (BFI) in IPS displays are nothing new, but in the past they've been tied to the maximum refresh rate of the monitor. There have been some attempts to tie BFI to variable refresh rate, most commonly with Asus’ ELMB (Extreme Low Motion Blur) Sync in some of its monitors – though it was imperfect. Through the new Gsync module, created in partnership with Mediatek, Nvidia was able to force the backlight to speed up or slow down, depending on the current refresh rate of the display, which results in less blurry motion. However, while this does seem to be more flexible than systems like ELMB, Gsync Pulsar does have limitations.
By default, Gsync Pulsar will be set to turn itself off whenever the refresh rate and frame rate drop below 90Hz. This is because of the strobing backlight – if it slows down too much, the strobing itself becomes noticeable, and is going to be uncomfortable to sit in front of. You can set it all the way down to 75Hz if you want to, but that is the hard lower limit at the time of writing. Nvidia did claim that it was working on a way to enable it at 60Hz as well, but only time will tell if that’s going to be any good.
But Does it Work?
When I visited Nvidia at CES 2026, it had a couple of demos showing Gsync Pulsar in action, and the most compelling one was in Anno 117: Pax Romana. That’s not the kind of game I’d typically associate with high-framerate gaming, but by quickly panning around the map, the difference in motion clarity was pretty obvious. However, that’s only one demo in a controlled environment.
Gsync Pulsar is going to live or die by how well it handles refresh rates that are actually, well, variable. The motion seemed extremely smooth when it was running at 200+ fps on a high-end GPU, but what happens when the frame rate starts dipping down towards that 90 fps lower limit?
Luckily we won’t have to wait too long to find out. Gaming monitors with Gsync Pulsar will start hitting the market in the next week, so I’ll be able to get it into the lab and really put it to the test. But for now, from what I saw at CES, it’s looking promising – just don’t expect it to actually make you better at video games.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
