NVIDIA Showcases Freestyle, Ansel Update, And Big F***** Gaming Displays

How would you like a 65-inch, 4K display with G-Sync, HDR and 120Hz refresh rate? That’s what NVIDIA calls a Big F***** Gaming Display… sorry, excuse me, that’s Big Format Gaming Display, or BFGD. No, we’re not kidding…

Leveraging partners with monitor experience already, NVIDIA is creating yet another new format/standard of displays called BFGD, and it builds on many of the existing technologies on the market, but with a bigger push for… well, more. Acer, ASUS, and HP will all be creating these high-end TVs in the office. People have been calling out for dumb TVs for a long time, and these monitors look like they’ll fit the bill.

Pushing 4K content at 120Hz is no easy feat, and to get that going on a 65-inch display certainly takes some doing. With G-Sync enabled, it’ll also be able to frequency match native video playback as well, for stutter free movies, from 23.976 FPS, 24 and 25 FPS formats. The real interesting bit is specific to the HDR portion.

High Dynamic Range that’s showing up in UHD movies is a bit of a fragmented mess, and this is especially true on monitors. While there are many HDR compatible displays, most of them only accept HDR input, and don’t output correctly, i.e. with 10-bit and 1000-nit brightness. While proper support for real 10-bit displays is still up in the air, these BFGD displays will have 1000-nit peak luminance, full array back-lighting, and DCI-P3 color gamut.

These BFGD’s are not completely dumb, as they also include Android TV through an integrated SHIELD, which means you can use the supplied remote and controller to access Android Apps, make use of SHIELD Streaming, and chill out to Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon Video, with the Help of Google Assistant if you wish. No word on price, but we’re pretty sure it’s a case of “if you have to ask…”

While a huge Formating display is cool, something else that a few more people will be able to use is updates to NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay Highlights, Ansel, and something new called Freestyle. We recently took a look at Highlights in PUBG, as it records specific events automagically while you play the game, such as when you get a multi kill or die by frying pan. Fortnite Battle Royale will now have this feature enabled in an upcoming patch, along with Elex and a number of other titles.

Ansel, NVIDIA’s custom camera and screenshot engine will be getting some new features, like extra filters, which can be applied simultaneously, plus a new user interface to make managing the camera a little easier, you’ll also be able to capture HDR shots as well.

The new feature, called NVIDIA Freestyle, is a bit of an oddball, but strangely enough, something that quite a few people are likely to use once they know about it. Freestyle ties in with GeForce Experience and it lets you apply post-processing filters to your games, while playing them. This is much like the ENB and DLL injection filters that are so common in game modding.

Freestyle will let you alter the game display with 15 filters, including brightness and contrast, saturation, hue, exposure, half-tone, sepia and other special effects. There is even a night mode which reduces blue light to make it a bit easier to fall asleep after a long night of gaming. Freestyle will be applied at the driver level, so there should be very few compatibility issues, and over 100 games will be supported out of the gate. It’s still currently in beta, but we expect a release soon.