ULMB or G-sync, which do you prefer?

Hi All, I've had a revelation recently regarding gaming on my 144Hz G-sync monitor - 120Hz ULMB is SOOOO much better than 144Hz G-sync! There's almost zero motion blur with ULMB activated, I'd never tried it before, I'd always assumed 144Hz G-sync would be better for competetive fps gaming (like Titanfall 2 for instance), but 120fps seems like enough, and then you get the complete lack of motion blur as a bonus! I was concerned I'd see screen tearing, but I limit my fps to 120Hz using Rivatuner Statistics Server, and that might help to some degree - I'm sure there's tearing, but I'm really not noticing it. Gotta have your fps run mostly at 120fps though, if it drops a lot lower it's more 'juddery', I mean the occasional drop to 100+ fps is ok I've found, and as a final bonus it's allowed me to turn up some graphics settings because my new fps target is 24 fps lower than the previous 144fps. How do you run your high refresh rate monitors, have you experimented with ULMB vs G-sync? (I say either/or, because you can't have G-sync & ULMB activated at the same time, you gotta choose one or the other).

ULMB does lower screen brightness, but using my Spider4Pro colorimeter I've managed to work out how much brightness to set in order to match my previously used screen brightness - which using ULMB is basically 100% backlight brightness +96 Pulse Width equaling my 120cdm brightness target. Without ULMB I have backlight brightness set to only 16% to equal 120cdm - so you can really see how much ULMB could dim your screen. I've even got a seperate screen calibration (using Spyder4Pro) that's active when ULMB is turned on - because it does change colours/contrast, etc a bit.

 

I am a G-Sync guy myself. I have however noticed an improvement in motion blur and response times by using ULMB in certain games like CSGO, but the image/color quality and brightness degradation just is not worth it for me in most titles. I also agree that if you're able to maintain consistent high FPS in games you won't get screen tearing and makes g-sync somewhat useless.

Also apparently with my monitor you can use both ULMB and G-Sync at the same time via a hack/tweak but I haven't tested this myself yet.

https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2883

 

If you get yourself a colorimeter like the Spyder4Pro (newer versions now), then you could always create a seperate calibration profile for ULMB, which will align colours,etc, to the proper calibrated levels - then you just select the colour calibration profile you want on the fly using the 'Profile Chooser' applet that comes with your colourimeter if you change monitor settings (ie changing from G-sync to ULMB). There's nothing you can do about the decrease in brightness though, but it does depend on how bright you like to run your monitor, on mine I don't have a dip in brightness between G-sync and ULMB because I turn up the brightness level on my monitor when running ULMB (the same 120cdm as measured by my colorimeter in both G-sync & ULMB).

That's an interesting link re the ULMB & G-sync hack. I had a read of some of that thread, it looks like the hack does create some artifacts in some situations, doesn't seem ideal also as brightness is varied as the framerate & consequently strobing fluctuate. Interestingly, it does seem that NVidia are working on technologies to allow for ULMB & G-sync to be working together - this was concluded by the people that discovered this hack, they were able to infer that it was indicative of some kind of 'test mode' that was hidden that NVidia have been using to research the new technology. Praps we'll soon see ULMB/Gsync monitors that can officially enable both at the same time in the near future.