Η Nvidia insists it does not support any form of Adaptive Sync, such as AMD's FreeSync, other than its own G-Sync. So anyone who has purchased an Nvidia hi end graphics card and wants to enable an Adaptive Sync system for smoother on-screen graphics should definitely consider buying a G-Sync-supported display. The problem here is that screens with G-Sync are clearly less on the market than those with FreeSync, but also significantly more expensive.
These days it has become known that there is a way to harness the power of an Nvidia graphics card and at the same time enable FreeSync on a screen that will support it. The problem here is that to achieve this, the system CPU requires an AMD APU.
Initially, on Reddit, the bryf50 member managed to find a way to keep FreeSync enabled on its screen while the graphics were being processed by its Nvidia graphics card. In this case, bryf50 took advantage of a new feature of World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which allows in the case of multiple cards in the system, to choose which will be used to edit the graphics. So the bryf50 connected its FreeSync display to an AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100 and set the GTX 1080 Ti as the main graphics card in the game. The result was that FreeSync continued to work, with the GTX 1080 Ti processing the graphics and the Pro WX 4100 simply sending the image to the screen. Theoretically, if future games had this new Battle for Azeroth feature, it could be exploited by Nvidia hi-end graphics card holders to gain indirect compatibility with AMD FreeSync.
The latest version of Windows 10, 1803, adds features to the operating system where you can switch between the used graphics card. But if we have two graphics cards in the system, Windows 10 does not seem to allow one to be defined as "High Performance" and the other as "Power Saving". But if one of them is built into the processor, then Windows 10 seems to automatically define it as the "Power Saving" card.
Another Reddit user, survfate, took advantage of this fact with the help of an Ryzen 3 2200G APU from AMD. So he managed to activate FreeSync in applications that did not have the new feature of Battle Of Azeroth. This APU supports FreeSync and with the help of the new graphic switching feature of Windows 10 1803, it managed to activate FreeSync in Batman: Arkham Knight and AMD Freesync Windmill Demo, with an Nvidia GTX 1060 taking over the graphics processing. The built-in 2200G APU card simply undertook to send the image to the screen and provide the necessary compatibility with FreeSync. With the above trick, FreeSync can theoretically be activated in any application.
The above cases, but also those of other users who reported correspondingly successful results, prompted several technology sites to confirm whether this is true. But also to explore whether there is an issue with the latency that is added, since the image is no longer transferred directly from the graphics card to the screen, but through a second graphics card.
Two examples of related articles are those published by PCPerspective and Techspot.
In case of the PCPerspective article consider using an APU and how much latency is added to display the image on the screen.
In case of the Techspot article consider using a second graphics card in games that offer the option of selecting the graphics card to handle the graphics. Here the games selected are Middle-earth Shadow of War and Hitman.
Before you rush to buy an APU or a small AMD graphics card, let's say that Nvidia may block this feature in future drivers. And judging by the past and the way the company chose to lock PhysX exclusively on its cards, but also its insistence on not supporting any Adaptive Sync technology other than its own, this is probably very likely.
