(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
First teased what seems like ages ago (at CES 2024), Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar is a significant enhancement of the company's variable refresh rate (VRR) technology, promising both smoother motion and more visual clarity. Nvidia's game-changing claim about Pulsar is that, under the right circumstances, it can deliver a gaming image with the smoothness equivalent of a 1,000Hz screen—also first seen at the show.
It’s a potentially explosive feature for competitive gamers, and we’ve been patiently waiting...and waiting...for the tech to be injected into next-generation gaming monitors. Well, they’re finally arriving at CES 2026.
Ahead of the show, Nvidia arranged a loaner Asus ROG Strix XG27AQNGV for us, one of the first gaming monitors to feature G-Sync Pulsar. This model has a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel resolution and a 360Hz native refresh rate; earlier versions of this display will be familiar to serious watchers of the market for premium gaming monitors. However, with Nvidia’s new G-Sync Pulsar tech, the effective motion clarity should approximate a refresh rate three times that, according to Nvidia.
That's a mighty big bump, and it's the highest refresh-rate claim we've ever seen (even if it's an "effective" approximation). But is it one that you’ll even notice? Let's take a closer look.
What Is Nvidia G-Sync Pulsar?
In short, G-Sync Pulsar is an evolution of variable refresh rate technology. Traditional VRR dynamically adjusts the display’s refresh rate to match the GPU’s frame rate at any given moment, effectively eliminating screen tearing and stutter. However, VRR doesn’t eliminate display motion blur, which is caused by both slow LCD transitions and the persistence of an image on your retina as it tracks on-screen movement. (This persistence is an issue for all kinds of screens, of course, not just LCDs.)
It's possible to eliminate motion blur by strobing the display's backlight and making sure all pixels are in the correct state when the backlight is strobed. Nvidia has offered this feature, which it calls Ultra Low Motion Blur 2 (ULMB 2), for many years in compatible monitors. However, using this technique at a non-fixed frequency can cause serious flicker, which has previously prevented its effective use in VRR displays. Pulsar appears to have overcome this limitation with the combination of three techniques, which Nvidia refers to as Rolling Scan, Compensation Pulse, and G-Sync Variable Overdrive.
(Credit: Nvidia)Rolling Scan allows pixels to achieve their correct values before being backlit, thereby showing objects at the correct location. It does this by strobing (or pulsing, hence the Pulsar name) for only 25% of the time it takes to render a single frame. This means that any object hold time is four times shorter, resulting in four times the effective motion clarity. At 250 frames per second (fps) with Pulsar enabled, you theoretically get the equivalent motion clarity of a 1,000Hz monitor rendering at 1,000fps.
(Credit: Nvidia)At the same time, each screen segment is briefly pulsed a second time to compensate for the variation in frame rate, and to push the flicker outside human visual perception—that’s the Compensation Pulse feature.
Although the rolling scan always moves at the same speed, there is a variable wait time before the next scan, allowing it to follow the VRR of the source input. This is where G-Sync Variable Overdrive comes in. It adjusts the pulses based on the predicted time the next frame will be displayed.
Yes, this is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo and theoretical concepts. But what G-Sync Pulsar ultimately does is eliminate the need to choose between smooth variable refresh rates and the improved motion clarity of ULMB 2, instead combining both.
Putting Pulsar to the Test: Will the Eyes Have It?
This is certainly bleeding-edge tech, so to test it, we needed to bring out the big guns: a cutting-edge desktop PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X flagship CPU, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. Hooking up the ROG Strix XG27AQNGV to these components means it can easily handle games at extremely high refresh rates at its native 1440p resolution. It's hard to do much better with today's consumer parts.
Pressing one of the buttons on the back of the monitor opens the on-screen display (OSD), and the first option it presents is to toggle Pulsar on or off. Once you turn it on, you’ll notice that the screen immediately gets brighter. You're offered only one user-adjustable setting, called Pulsar Low FPS, which changes the frame rate at which Pulsar automatically turns off to prevent perceived flicker. By default, it’s set to 90fps, but it can be adjusted to as low as 75fps or as high as 120fps.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)As for settings adjustments, I enabled HDR in Windows and the games we tested, as well as ray tracing, where the game supported it. I then examined three different games to see if I could identify any significant improvements with the new Pulsar feature activated.
First, I tried Anno 117: Vox Romana, a city-building strategy game from Ubisoft. It's perhaps a strange choice for a high-refresh-rate monitor like this, but even in a non-esports setting, we can see the benefits of Pulsar at work. Anno 117 is a game of many small, moving parts, often overlapping with one another. While moving across the scene, you can observe the benefits of the improved motion clarity as you slide between buildings. It was especially noticeable while it was raining in-game.
(Credit: Nvidia)Next, I moved on to a game you’d expect to play on an esports monitor: Marvel Rivals. It also benefits from the boost in clarity. In the practice range with Pulsar engaged, the clarity of the text was markedly better, and the movement of the Galacta Bots significantly smoother.
I also ventured over to Marvel Rivals' Times Square, which features a lot of text and character overlap. It's another good place to see the benefits of Pulsar in action. Finally, I jumped into a quick game against bots, which felt and looked silky smooth.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)I deployed a similar test in Overwatch 2, heading to the practice range to observe the text. Just like in Marvel Rivals, I could see that the improved motion clarity in the game's on-screen moving text; Pulsar also improved the motion clarity of the bots.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Is G-Sync Pulsar Worth It?
I must admit that these improvements are minor in the grand scheme of things. During testing, I asked a bunch of colleagues to stop by as I toggled Pulsar on and off and ran through some gameplay. Many of them didn’t notice the difference at first, or had to have the difference pointed out to them. Even Nvidia’s example clip embedded above uses a high-speed camera to capture the difference. This is a difference that esports players will appreciate most; casual gamers probably won't care.
However, the numbers don't lie: Pulsar is an impressive technical achievement, as I found when I measured it using the Nvidia Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT), shown in the photo below. It's a little clip-on sensor that straps to your display, like so...
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)While the tool is used to measure latency, not the input lag we typically test for in our gaming monitor reviews, it still offers the best example of Pulsar in action. The LDAT Display Test includes a Textured Stripe setting that generates a useful scrolling test pattern, which lets us easily evaluate a display's motion performance characteristics. Here is where I observed perhaps the most dramatic difference in motion clarity, as the text and image were vastly improved as I toggled Pulsar on and off.
I also performed a latency test on Counter-Strike 2, where I noted an average of 7.7ms (milliseconds) of latency after firing 100 shots—an excellent result for an esports monitor.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Ultimately, Pulsar is a noteworthy (if not groundbreaking) evolution of G-Sync that only hard-core gamers are likely to appreciate. Eliminating the need to choose between VRR and ULMB is unquestionably of value for esports pros. Assuming enough new hardware supports it, G-Sync Pulsar will likely become the standard for esports gaming going forward.
As for the hardware, you won't have to wait long to try it out yourself. The Pulsar-ready Asus ROG Strix XG27AQNGV, as well as the Acer Predator XB273U F5, and the MSI MPG 272QRF X36—all of them 27-inch panels—will be available on January 7 for $649, while the AOC Agon Pro AG276QSG will be available for $599.