Inspired by this video from Techless where he shows that
OD Normal with Freesync is slightly slower than without Freesync I was wondering if this was also true for OD Extreme at 390hz.
it is indeed possible to run slower OD Normal/OD Extreme, which can also be paired with VRB, this is useful to make
custom 240hz resolution run with OD Normal with less overshoot and to
run 390hz OD Extreme with less overshoot.
As described by Discorz in the first page of this thread (I assume that it might also be possible to achieve it with AMD gpus if you remove the freesync extension block with CRU) it is possible to use overdrives when Freesync is ON in specific conditions.
With an Nvidia setup all you need to do is
(1) enable Freesync in the monitor OSD,
(2) disable G-Sync Compatible in the Nvidia Control Panel and now you'll be able to use custom overdrives with Freesync ON,
without Freesync/Gsync actually being used (If you do not disable G-Sync compatible in NVCP, overdrives will still be greyed out and VRB/Freesync will be mutually exclusive).
Just like in Techless video, the difference is subtle but when testing at 390hz with Smoothfrog and VRB Extreme OD Extreme with Freesync ON vs OFF at high speed (7/8 px/frame) you can see that
pixel transitions such as Green to 191 and 127 background have less color inversion afterimage due to OD Extreme having a less aggressive overdrive.
This is also true with 240hz OD Normal, providing less overshoot than without Freesync overdrive scaling.
Please note: I also found out that enabling VRB in the OSD can sometime disable Freesync even if you follow (1) and (2) steps
but if you bind VRB to an Hot Key Assignment it will not disable Freesync (???) so play around with that if you have issues, sometimes it works with OSD and sometimes it does not unless you use an Hot Key assignment, but that's to be expected since this trick is basically using a firmware bug.
Thanks to Acer for making the most buggy OSD I've seen to date.
Example of VRB disabling Freesync and Hot-Key VRB circumventing this issue.
TL;DR: OSD bug related to Freesync can force Overdrives to run with a less aggressive voltage without VRR actually being used,
minimal difference but small QOL improvement for people who have been running 390hz OD Extreme or 240hz OD Normal, can also be paired with strobing (^see video^)