Nvidia’s new motion blur tech fixes issues with pure science

Nvidia has unveiled ULMB2, which should begin to fix major motion blur issues on high refresh rate G-Sync monitors going forward.

High refresh rate monitors currently suffer from a fair bit of motion blur, especially in esports titles. This can be incredibly distracting, as displays can occasionally struggle with issues such as ghosting when gaming at high refesh rates. However, a new update to G-Sync monitors aims to fix all of that.

Dubbed ULMB2, or Ultra Low Motion Blur 2, Nvidia aims to reduce motion blur on the screen to produce clearer images when in-game. It’s all done incredibly scientifically, as the video demonstrating how they reached this point shows.

In the video, Nvidia engineers passed a high-speed camera over a screen, capturing data and images to determine exactly when and where the image changed on screen. They then broke this down and determined that manipulating the backlight on the monitor further could reduce motion blur on the screen.

How Nvidia ULMB2 works

Instead of having the backlight remain on, it flickers at a frequency that the eye can’t pick up and is timed with the LCD crystals on the display. In doing so, it effectively goes dark when the image on the screen transitions to the next.

So in this instance, a bike in Fortnite passes by really fast and normally is masked by motion blur to cover the transitional images of going from left to right. What this ends up doing is eliminating most of the motion blur that would be generated in the transitional images.

Nvidia claims that those with 360Hz monitors will now have an effective refresh rate of 1400Hz, which is worked out via a maths equation: [Effective Motion Clarity = Refresh rate * (1 / Duty Cycle)]. No, we don’t get what it means either.

Images are clearer on screen and the best news is, this piece of tech is available today – for a particular sect of monitors.

Those with these G-Sync-enabled, 360Hz monitors can download a firmware update that will allow you to turn ULMB2 on. Of course, this will come to other refresh rates at some point, including those that we’ve reviewed quite recently.

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