Today NVIDIA has brought variable refresh rate support to its GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The company initially promised variable refresh support on GeForce Now back in early January during CES, and has seemingly waited so that it could launch alongside GeForce Now Day Passes, which are also now available.
Variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies, including NVIDIA's own G-Sync, have been around for around a decade now, and allow a monitor to synchronize its refresh rate to the instantaneous framerate of a game. This synchronization prevents screen tearing, when two or more frames are present on a display at the same time. Without a VRR technology, gamers either have to tolerate the visual incongruity of screen tearing or enable V-Sync, which solves screen tearing by locking the framerate to the refresh rate (or a fraction thereof). VRR became popular because V-Sync added latency and could depress framerates due to it effectively being a framerate limiter.
