This is a good news/bad news sort of situation, mixed with a healthy dose of “yes and no”. The good news is that AMD FreeSync and NVIDIA G-Sync both derive from VESA Adaptive Sync technology. As such, there’s a lot of overlap between the two technologies and they’re essentially identical. Both act to prevent framerate de-sync between the graphics card and the monitor, both have a framerate range based on resolution, both won’t allow framerates to drop below that minimum, and so on. If you have a gaming monitor that features FreeSync or G-Sync, you’ll get excellent variable refresh rate performance and are very unlikely to encounter unsightly phenomena such as screen tearing or very low framerates.
The bad news? FreeSync and G-Sync employ proprietary chipsets on the monitor side and driver elements on the graphics card side to differentiate themselves, so by definition they’re not compatible. AMD means for FreeSync to work with…AMD Radeon graphics cards. While NVIDIA, to no one’s surprise, intends G-Sync for GeForce graphics cards (hint: that’s where the G comes from).
However, due to their inherent similarities we find ourselves in an “it doesn’t hurt to try” scenario. Let’s explain.