VRR monitors are becoming ubiquitous, now VESA’s certification wants to make them good

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The new certification program from VESA is designed to help customers find better variable refresh rate monitors. The new adaptive-sync display compliance test specification is designed for variable refresh rate displays, looking out for flicker and dropped frames, unlike the previous HDR certification program which measured things like peak brightness.

Variable refresh rate is a technology that allows a display to be synchronized with the output of whatever device is plugged into it, reducing the appearance of visual artifacts, screen tearing, and frame pacing issues. When support for VRR first appeared on graphics cards and monitors, it was tied to specific manufacturers. VESA built native adaptive-sync support into DisplayPort 1.2a based on tech provided byAMD, and now it's a standard that's cross-compatible with graphics processors from all three major manufacturers.

The open adaptive-sync standard is more of a wild west when it comes to the certification schemes offered by the two companies. Only a small percentage of the monitors it tested actually passed, as part of the initiative. They didn't offer a broad enough range of refresh rates or other image quality issues.

VESA's new certification is designed to give assurances about a monitor or laptop. It is an open source industry standard and its testing criteria are public.

There are obviously proprietary standards from the vendor, but they have never disclosed the full extent of their tests. You can see that a monitor needs to go through over 300 tests to get a G-sync logo, but it's not clear what these tests are. Over the years, there has been some confusion when it comes to criteria like Lifelike HDR.

VESA is testing raw adaptive-sync performance instead of using specific standards. VESA expects its certification logos to sit alongside manufacturer-specific equivalents. A G-sync logo tells you how a monitor will perform with an input source, but a VESA logo tells you how a monitor will perform with an output source.

VESA's adaptive-sync tech is only available for the DisplayPort standard, which is used across monitors and laptops. It isn't going to help you pick out one of the TVs that offer support for Virtual Reality via HDMI 2.1, it's more of a wild west.

VESA's new certification standard holds displays to a higher standard than vendor-specific certifications, as well as being more public. He told me in a follow-up email that he expects less than half of the monitors on the market to meet VESA's standards.

There are two compliance logos that can be earned. MediaSync is for monitors that you might use to watch videos or create content, while adaptivesync is for monitors that you might use to play games. If the device passes the tests, manufacturers are allowed to put the relevant logos on the box, website or wherever they think potential customers might see it. A display that fails the tests can still use the logo.

Image: VESA

Image: VESA

The first logo is called MediaSync. The focus here is on making sure monitors are able to play back video content with less than 1ms of jitter, at each of the 10 major international frame rate standards. The frames don't divide evenly into the refresh rate of the screen, making it difficult to play 24 frames per second on 60Hz displays. Three-two pull down was a common way of dealing with the problem, but it can create unpleasant juddering. A MediaSync logo shows that a monitor can use adaptive-sync to avoid issues.

The adaptivesync logo is for high refresh rate gaming monitors. A monitor with an adaptivesync logo needs to be able to run at a maximum refresh rate of more than 120 frames per second in factory default mode, and it also needs to be able to go down to 60 frames per second. If your frame rate drops to 58 frames per second, then a monitor would be expected to use frame-doubling to bring it up to 116 frames per second and bring it back into its adaptive sync range.

The box to the right of the certification logo will reflect the maximum refresh rate of the monitor.

It isn't enough to display this range of frame rates. A monitor needs to do well to be certified. That means not showing a flicker that is visible to the naked eye when the frame rate is rapidly changing. When a monitor provides an input with support for higher frame rates than a panel actually supports, it means not dropping frames.

VESA takes a detailed approach to how it measures response time or the time it takes for a monitor to update. It is common to see this as a gray to gray response time, or roughly the time it takes for a pixel to change from one shade of gray to another. If response times are too slow, monitors can show ghosting, where the remains of a previous image are still visible on a screen, as the pixels struggle to keep up. The monitor needs to have a response time of under 5ms in order to get the logo.

A lot of manufacturers claim that their monitors can respond to 1ms. In real-world tests like those conducted by Rtings, response times are higher than 1ms. Any response time of under 6ms is a good value.

Independent reviewers like Rtings and VESA's test centers are more rigorous with their testing than manufacturers are. Some manufacturers might perform a number of gray-to-gray changes and then pick the best result. A warmer panel can respond quicker than a cold one. It is possible to achieve a faster response time on paper but at the expense of ugly visual artifacts.

VESA's solution is to take an average of the different gray-to-gray transitions and measure them. The temperature at which the tests are conducted is between 22.5 and 24.5 degrees Celsius. Limits are placed on how much overshoot and undershoot a monitor is able to show and still pass, and monitors are given time to reach a stable temperature first.

The first certified monitors should appear on the VESA website starting today, but Wooster wouldn't say how many VESA members he expects to pay for their devices to eventually be MediaSync or adaptivesync certified. He points to the number of devices that currently carry one of VESA's HDR certifications as an example of the amount of monitors and laptops we might eventually see carrying the new adaptivesync logos

These little orange and blue logos could quickly become an essential mark of quality when buying your next monitor or laptop, considering VESA's formidable list of members from across the display industry.