OLED Gaming Laptops
A revolutionary all-aluminum design makes the 2024 ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16 stunningly slim and lighter. Your jaw will drop even lower when you open ASUS new Nebula Display, the first gaming laptop with an OLED display capable of G-SYNC, making your games appear and feel better than ever. It wasn’t simple, but here’s how they did it.
Why G-SYNC affects the gameplay?
First, why current game screens need G-SYNC. When you play a game, your computer’s hardware works hard to provide as much FPS as possible. More frames per second means better motion and reduced latency, giving you an edge over your opponents.
However, creating frames is just half the fight. Your computer must rapidly draw the frames on the screen. Your display “refreshes” itself a specific number of times per second, redrawing the screen using the newest graphics chip frame. Gaming displays refresh at 120Hz, 144Hz, or even 240Hz and higher, allowing for ultra-smooth animation (if your game can produce that many frames per second). Laptop screens refresh at 60Hz.
But your game’s frame rate doesn’t usually match your display’s refresh rate. The display often refreshes before your game finishes generating a frame. On a standard display, this causes “screen tearing,” which makes the picture seem torn in the center. VSync, an older method, restricts GPU frame rate output to match display refresh. While eliminating tearing, this introduces latency and stuttering.
Adaptive Sync (G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible on NVIDIA devices) addresses these issues. By dynamically matching your graphics card’s output, the display only refreshes when a frame arrives. This makes your game smoother, tear-free, and more input-responsive. One decade after G-SYNC technology debuted in 2013, it’s a must-have on every gaming monitor.
Variable refresh rate on OLED laptops
ASUS’ ZenBook notebooks had OLED panels a few years ago. ROG gaming laptops had a problem, G-SYNC didn’t perform properly on OLED panels. OLED screens vary from LCD displays, thus they need some history to understand why.
LEDs light through liquid crystals to form each pixel on classic LCD screens like the IPS panels on most gaming laptops. When the screen refreshes, the liquid crystals change, but the backlight remains. The LEDs brighten or dim independently of the pixels when you adjust your laptop’s brightness.
The system is good, yet it has drawbacks. Blacks aren’t completely black with a steady backlight since light shines through the display. This reduces picture contrast, or “punchiness,” by making black levels seem dark grey. Nebula HDR Displays employ Mini LED panels to decrease backlight to avoid this. This generates a stunning picture but thickens the display device. Mini LED doesn’t make a difference on their performance-focused ROG Strix laptops, but for our thin-and-light Zephyrus series, when you’re shaving fractions of a millimeter to make the device as small as possible, it’s not ideal.
Here comes OLED. OLED displays employ Organic LEDs so tiny that they can use one LED per subpixel, unlike LCD displays, which required a backlight layer. For complete blackness, each pixel may be turned off. For a vibrant photograph, this near-infinite contrast makes it “pop.” If you’re not a display geek, compare an LCD and OLED and you’ll notice the difference instantly.
Due to their high pixel concentration, laptop OLED displays must be built differently than desktop monitors or TVs, with one major drawback, instead of maintaining a static brightness, they use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to pulse for a certain amount of time each second (known as the pixel emission rate). The longer the pulse, the brighter your eyes will see.
The pulsating light is part of the pixel, not an LED array, unlike LCD panels. That implies brightness and framerate are interconnected, if framerate declines, pixel emission rate reduces, causing brightness and color shifts that distort the picture. These changes are too many for a laptop’s display controller to handle frame-by-frame.
ASUS want to develop an ultra-thin gaming laptop with a stunning OLED Gaming Laptops screen, however the display controller won’t work with G-SYNC. Perfect OLED picture or G-SYNC motion must be sacrificed.
How ROG achieved the impossible: G-SYNC on OLED gaming laptops
ROG brainstormed with NVIDIA and Samsung Display. After trying several workarounds and performing a lot of creative engineering, they discovered a solution, maintain the pixel emission rate constant for consistent brightness but run it so fast that the system can throw in a new frame at any time.
Monitors with G-Sync
On their new Zephyrus G14 features a 120Hz display and the G16 a 240Hz display. However, they increased the pixel emission rate to 960 times per second, giving us greater flexibility in when to show those frames.
Frames are delivered to the screen and rendered when the subpixels pulse back on after the GPU generates them. At 960 pulses per second, the next opportunity to show a new frame is 1.04 milliseconds (compared to 4.1 or 8.3 milliseconds for 240Hz or 120Hz displays). While the system can only show 120 or 240 frames per second (on the G14 or G16), you can view them much sooner after they’re produced without the stuttering, tearing, or input latency of a non-adaptive display.
How to utilize G-SYNC on 2024 Zephyrus G14/G16
You don’t need to know any of this to utilize G-SYNC on these amazing new computers. It is used in the same manner as a conventional gaming laptop:
- Make sure G-SYNC is turned on for your laptop display by clicking the arrow in the lower-right corner of your taskbar to launch the NVIDIA Control Panel and choose the Set Up G-SYNC option.
- Then just launch a game and begin playing, it’s that simple.
- Especially if you play in HDR, you’ll enjoy breathtaking visual quality with pixel-perfect black levels, incredibly smooth motion, and contrast and color that really pop off the screen.
- Additionally, since OLED displays respond so quickly, every movement is crystal clear and free of ghosting or blur.
