Apart from the huge gaming market on Mac, video editing can benefit greatly due to many clips having different frame rates. Also even stuff like scrolling large images in photoshop where frame rates drop. VRR can keep it looking smoother.
Does Apple publish the VRR window for their devices? As far as I can tell most devices only support VRR 48-120Hz. There are a few GSync devices that go to 40, but I've not seen many (any) support refresh rates for VRR less than that (should trigger LFC).
It’s the same on this display. 48-120hz.
That was my attempt at humour.
Video is definitely a use-case. ProMotion could work just as well for that though, nicely supporting 24, 25, 30, 50, 60 and high frame rate video signals. So ProMotion would be fine too but nice with VRR. Running at higher refresh rates generally also helps with response times and image persistence. And then there are also lunatics like me who will be utilising this, at least in part, for that huuuuge Mac gaming market
Absolutely humongous. We get several hundred listeners regularly now on the Mac Game Cast. (tongue in cheek; But we genuinely have seen a huge increase in gaming interest since Apple Silicon on the Mac. By no means a big gaming market but it is bigger than it's been the past 15 year I think. Probably even longer
I don't care much about high refresh rates (I can barely notice it) but it feels wrong spending $1700 in a monitor and not getting the same refresh rate as my 5+ years old MacBook Pro. Feels like buying something that's already outdated.
The nice thing about video use cases is that the VRR window range is less important, so long as you can find an integer multiple of your target rate within the window. So long as you can do that, you'll can get the cadence right and it will look fine.
Apple's whole "ProMotion" thing is built on top of VRR to make it seamless. Whether or not it's adopted by games is another matter. Since I built a small PC for games, I haven't followed too closely how quickly game devs have kept up with the Mac's capabilities. But my M1 MBP was able to use VRR with my 4K 120Hz monitor for years, and I've seen some reports of folks claiming that they can enable/use adaptive sync in games on a Mac.
Outside this new display though, I _think_ only the M1 and later MacBook Pros with 14/16" screens can do it without using a 3rd party display.
Use Adaptive Sync with your Mac
When you’re playing a game on Mac, use Adaptive Sync to help your display render the content correctly by dynamically adjusting the refresh rate.support.apple.com
Someone showing off Adaptive Sync on Monterey in a couple real games:
ProMotion is not VRR. ProMotion has a set of fixed frame rates it can work at, that it can just switch between instantly and adapt to content with. The set of frame rates supported by any given ProMotion display isn't fixed. There's an episode in my podcast where we go over this. Apple only has quite limited documentation on the supported frame rates for their displays, but they do list some sets of supported refresh rates. One iPad I roughly remember was 10, 24, 25 30, and the multiples going up to 120. I've never seen a Mac ProMotion go below 48 (set to 48 when playing back 24FPS video content). And unlike regular AdaptiveSync, VRR, you do need to do a little as a developer to get the most out of ProMotion - Some stuff is automatic but you can help inform the display what fremerates you can probably hit on a frame-by-frame basis - But you should effectively run as if V-SYNC is enabled, but you get the opportunity to refresh either after 8ms, 16ms, 20.833ms, or whatever your ProMotion display supports.
