I still kind of have a hard time wrapping my mind around how it all works and feels, I wish a place around were I live had a display set up or had a friend with one. From my understanding it takes low frame rates and fluctuating frame rates and matches that with the monitors refresh rate, which eliminates precievable lag or controller unresponsiveness? Am I right? But how does it look when a game runs at 20fps? Will it still look chunky and rough or does G-sync smooth that out? That's the type of stuff I need to see in person to fully understand.
No, the benefits of G-Sync really stop once you hit below 30fps.
To understand the benefits of adaptive refresh (G-Sync), you need to understand the problems with traditional fixed refresh displays.
Your GPU will render frames as fast as it can and then send it to the monitor, but the monitor will only refresh at set intervals. The result of this can lead to
screen tearing. The solution was VSync, but that also introduces its own issues. Your GPU is forced wait until the current refresh on the display is finished before sending the next frame, this creates input lag as the visual information displayed to you is potentially old. It is also the case that if you your GPU cannot render the frames fast enough to match the refresh rate, and your GPU drops behind, the game begins to stutter.
G-Sync solves this by letting the GPU control when the monitor refreshes, so when the frame has been rendered and sent to the monitor, then the monitor will refresh at that moment. That solves these issues and brings some other advantages in that a game running at 54fps (example) will look pretty much as good as a game running at 60fps, or on a higher refresh rate display, you will get the visual advantage of a game running at 70fps vs 60fps, or 80fps vs 60fps, or above.
60hz becomes an arbitrary line and not a benchmark you need to hit in order to get that refresh sync (to avoid tearing, etc). On PCs, G-Sync monitors (outside of 4K displays) are coupled with high refresh rate panels (e.g. 144hz), so there are two effects at work for people in this case. You get a higher refreshing monitor that you can take advantage of and the benefits of G-Sync explained above, so it adds up into something rather good.
