The staff of Rtings has embarked upon their own in-house testing of G-SYNC compatibility with FreeSync monitors (introduced with GeForce driver 417.71), and have released a video to introduce this new project:

While their choice of NVIDIA's Pendulum demo might be up for debate (since let's face it, any time NVIDIA anything is used to test, well, anything, there will always be a conspiracy theory) they have made some noteworthy observations about their experience vs. an AMD FX 580 with the same monitors. Still, as they point out in the article, "This test is by no means exhaustive, and your results may vary depending on the specific games you are playing, and your specific graphics card."

From RTings:

"We test FreeSync on a custom built PC, with an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB. Each monitor is connected via DisplayPort, as NVIDIA's FreeSync implementation does not currently work over HDMI. We use NVIDIA's Pendulum G-SYNC demo to test for tearing, stuttering, screen blanking, and other artifacts. We start at the monitor's standard refresh rate, and gradually decrease the sliders until we could see any issues. From there, we gradually increase the sliders until we start seeing tearing or other issues. The results of both of these tests give us the effective variable refresh rate range. We repeat the test at least twice to confirm our findings.

We use the results of this test to subjectively assign a result, based on how well the monitor supports NVIDIA's FreeSync implementation. The possible results are:

  • Yes, NVIDIA Certified: This is reserved for monitors that are certified by NVIDIA as being compatible with NVIDIA FreeSync.
  • Yes, Native: This is used to differentiate between monitors that support NVIDIA G-SYNC, instead of NVIDIA FreeSync.
  • Yes: These monitors are confirmed by us to support FreeSync with no major issues, but are not certified by NVIDIA.
  • Partial: These monitors at least partially support FreeSync, but we experienced some issues during testing. See the review for details of these issues.
  • No: These monitors either do not support FreeSync at all, or are unusable with FreeSync enabled."

There are currently 25 test results available to help out with your variable refresh-rate monitor selections for use on NVIDIA hardware.