Radeon Graphics Cards To Support HDR Displays and FreeSync Over HDMI In 2016 (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD's Radeon Technologies Group has announced a couple of new features for Radeon graphics support in 2016. FreeSync over HDMI support will be coming to all Radeons that currently support FreeSync. FreeSync over HDMI, however, will require new displays. The HDMI specification doesn't currently have support for variable refresh rates, but it does allow for vendor specific extensions. Radeon Technologies Group is using these vendor specific extensions to enable the technology. A number of FreeSync over HDMI compatible displays are slated to arrive early next year from brands including LG, Acer, and Samsung. The first notebook with FreeSync has also launched. Lenovo's Y700 gaming notebook is the first with a validated, FreeSync-compatible panel. The Radeon Technologies Group also announced that support for DisplayPort 1.3, HDMI 2.0a and HDR displays was coming in the 2016 pipeline as well. With current 8-bit panels, the range of colors, contrast, and brightness presented to users is only a fraction of what the human eye can see. When source material is properly mapped to an HDR panel, colors are more accurately displayed representing more closely what the human eye would see in the real world.

Comments

HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, when your LCD panels aren't capable of 64-bit color depth, you aren't doing HDR.

Old CRTs have more ability to reproduce HDR images than LCDs.

Re:HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand not reading the article but my god you didn't even read the summary!

Re:HDR

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

And what does the summary have to do with airplanes, exactly?

Re:HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you fail at certain things, let me help you.

You see, LCDs are fixed-colors with narrow bandwidth. You often have a 630nm red, 550nm green, and 450nm blue crystal pixel filter.

Because of that, you are NOT reproducing deeper reds or blues.

LED-based screens can overcome this.

CRT screens used wide-band phosphors.

I am an LCD panel technician. Try again when you understand the physics and can see past the bullshit marketing.

Re:HDR

[Tough Love]

Never mind being flat wrong about old CRTs, which are 6 bits per color except for some insanely pricey specialized monitors that don't work with standard equipment. Also wildly wrong about 64 bit color depth. Perhaps this particular internet monkey was thinking, 64 bit total of all components, or 21 bit depth.

Re:HDR

[Ichijo]

You see, LCDs are fixed-colors with narrow bandwidth. You often have a 630nm red, 550nm green, and 450nm blue crystal pixel filter. Because of that, you are NOT reproducing deeper reds or blues.

The NEC PA241W does. It's a wide gamut IPS LCD screen with no LEDs except the power light.

LED-based screens can overcome this.

By "LED-based," do you mean LED backlighting, or OLED?

Re:HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

considering that CRTs are purely analog, the "color depth" is going to be a function of the DAC and the bandwidth of the circuit.

Re:HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be a panel technician, but you don't know how color vision works. Take a look at the CIE chromaticity diagram

Pure monochromatic colors lie on the outer contour of the diagram. They are the most saturated colors you can find, and as such, mixing them gives you the wider color space. That's why modern cinema projectors use lasers as their light source, and why Rec. 2020 defines its primaries in term of specific wavelengths. Older CRTs, with their wider band phospors, can't give the same color spectrum. Just compare the Rec. 709 color space with that of Rec. 2020.

Re:HDR

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

http://www.jennyreadresearch.com/research/lab-set-up/datapixx/

16-bit capable CRTs have been around for AGES.

And just FYI, won't matter if you have 16-bit LCDs, guess what? Most GPUs DITHER DOWN TO 8 or 10 BITS. Even the newer 9xx series of nVidia cards do this BY DEFAULT.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1873004&page=2 - MadVR testing showing dithering results and conversations.

So software and history and physics laugh at you.

Re:HDR

[Tough Love]

You illustrated my point about specialized hardware nicely.

Re:HDR

[im_thatoneguy]

Narrow bandwidth is exactly what you want from a display's color primary. The more pure the display is the more saturated it is and the wider the color gamut. If someone could really create an LCD with a perfect 630nm red, 550nm green and 450nm blue without any other frequencies it would be a fantastic display. The ultimate displays currently available today are lasers because they naturally produce extremely narrow frequency bands exclusively. The second best are probably though LCDs + Quantum dot. Which are already almost achieving the full Rec2020 gamut.
http://static1.squarespace.com...

What the?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD consumer GPUs have supported 10 and 12 bpc DVI and DP displays since Evergreen...

Re:What the?

[damaki]

Not with a HDR profile. HDR is about mapping bigger values that what the bit depth allows through a non-linear color profile, it's a bit like a 24bit RGB jpeg with an AdobeRGB profile.

Re:What the?

[Anonymous Coward]

HDR is about mapping bigger values that what the bit depth allows through a non-linear color profile

Hey, we could use a power function. intensity = luminance ^ 2.2 should match the human visual system pretty well.
Oh, wait...

Re:What the?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually HDR is high dynamic range, very good displays can display simply with more range.
If you have a bad display you have to map HDR, by for example blooming bright parts in neighbour pixels, and using the distribution of bright and shadow vales to emulate more range.

Real HDR requires a very bright display that can also handle very dark parts at the same time, which also requires good pixel separation. Maybe we can get good displays with bright oleds.

Re:What the?

[sexconker]

No, HDR is about fucking with contrast in one part of the image and fucking with contrast differently in another part of the image.
It looks terrible every fucking time, and it's less accurate than just linearly plotting everything after setting your curves once for the whole image.
It's absolutely retarded to have a curve that is different over different parts of the same image.

HDR photography involves a person doing this once per image, typically based on a source with a higher range (like a camera's RAW output).
HDR displays involve sending a 10, 12, or whatever bpc signal to a display that can't display it. The display will then automatically fuck with the signal and stretch out dark areas and bright areas within the 8 bpc (or 6 bpc, ugh) that it can display.
More expensive displays use the LED backlight array to locally dim or brighten areas of the picture. This is better, but it can't extend the color range, only the luminance range.

HDR is shit. What we want is a wider range and a higher resolution.

Full LED displays (NOT LCDs with LED backlights) can easily reproduce a wider range of colors if they use the right LEDs (some displays have added an extra color like yellow, some simply move the RGB LEDs further apart on the spectrum). Other display types can do this as well, but it's not as simple as with LEDs.

If you want to just increase resolution over the existing range, we've had 10 and 12 bpc displays for decades.

Re:What the?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're only getting HDR with CRTs and LEDs and Plasma. LCD will not do anything realistically close to HDR.

Re:What the?

[TheSync]

Don't confuse HDR photography with HDR display.

HDR display comes closer to representing the luminance captured by imagers in the display. Today, linear light-level capture on imagers is crushed by a "gamma" function for transmission and display (Luminance out = code value ^ 2.4).

The gamma function inherently limits effective dynamic range to about 7 to 9 f-stops before you start to see banding between adjacent code values.

Alternative "electro-optic transfer functions" than gamma (such as SMPTE ST 2084 "perceptual quantizer" EOTF) can raise the effective dynamic range to 12-14 stops.

The increased dynamic range can be combined with high luminance displays in general that can do over 1000 cd/m^2. Today, most standard dynamic range programs are mastered at 100 cd/m^2 because of dynamic range limitations.

There are very few HDR displays shipping today (the Samsung JS9500 is one), but expect more to be announced at CES.

Re:What the?

[thegarbz]

Not with a HDR profile. HDR is about mapping bigger values that what the bit depth allows through a non-linear color profile, it's a bit like a 24bit RGB jpeg with an AdobeRGB profile.

This would interest me a lot more if it weren't 2015 and we still don't have a decent fucking colour management system at the OS level that actually forces colours to render correctly on a display.

Re:What the?

[sexconker]

HDR means "high dynamic range".

"High" is a joke - there's nothing higher about the range for photography or displays.
"Dynamic" means changing across different areas of the image.
"Range" refers to the range of signals (colors) that can be output.
  - For "HDR" photos the range is fixed at whatever format you're exporting to, typically someone takes a RAW file, fucks up the contrast in different areas, then exports it as a JPG or other 8-bits-per-channel format.
  - For "HDR" displays, this refers to actually changing the range by locally dimming/brightening different areas of the display. This gets you "extended" range for luminance but you don't get any corresponding color depth. This requires an input signal to be of a greater resolution than 8-bits-per-channel to be effective (otherwise it's just a shitty post processing effect).

Displays with a larger gamut and higher color resolution have existed for decades. They just weren't branded with the "HDR" buzzword.

It is impossible to separate "HDR" photography from "HDR" displays because they both do the same thing - fuck with contrast in different areas of an image differently in order to overcome limitations of the resolution/gamut of the format/display. The display you used as an example is "HDR" via the "Peak Illuminator" feature. It's just dimming the LED array, as all "HDR" displays are. If it has a 10-bit panel then it could in theory support the new standards, but I didn't see it as a listed feature (though Samsung offers updates to the breakout boxes for a few months and offers upgrades for a generation or two for a few hundred bucks that could allow it).

TL;DR HDR is shit.

Re:What the?

[im_thatoneguy]

No, HDR is about fucking with contrast in one part of the image and fucking with contrast differently in another part of the image.
It looks terrible every fucking time, and it's less accurate than just linearly plotting everything after setting your curves once for the whole image.
It's absolutely retarded to have a curve that is different over different parts of the same image.

Effectively every sentence you wrote is completely wrong. What you are calling "HDR" is actually "localized tone mapping" it's a filter effect like adjusting the histogram, it's not HDR. Your reaction is like someone looking at a red/green anaglyph stereo image (http://www.designcommunity.com/scrapbook/images/125.jpg) without glasses on and saying "This 3D business is AWFUL, the colors are all weird and the image is doubled. It doesn't look dimensional at all!"

HDR just means "High Dynamic Range". HDR displays are about accurately reproducing the world as captured on a display. So if you have a bright flashlight, the bulb could theoretically be so bright on screen that you have to squint or shield your eyes. That would probably be a poor aesthetic choice but it's not about doing localized tone mapping, it's about reproducing the world as it really exists slightly better. The trick is that they want to reproduce 16+ stops of luminance data and they don't want to break HDMI or BluRay. So their trick is to heavily compress the say 20 stops of dynamic range into only 10 bits. That means they have a gamma curve which is non-linear. And that's nothing new. Almost every single image in existence is gamma encoded in either Rec709 or sRGB's gamma. Because in order to store a SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) image like a jpeg you would be wasting a lot of data on precision the human eye can't see when stored in linear.

HDR photography does not require multiple exposures. HDR photography is just high dynamic range capture. A modern sensor like Alexa or RED can capture 18 stops of dynamic range. That is on the low end but in a single exposure already HDR.

HDR is not shit. HDR is exactly what you want "A wider range" of contrast. Instead of displaying black to gray, HDR can display black to blinding white. It's arguably and in my experience far more impressive than higher resolution.

Re:What the?

[im_thatoneguy]

It is impossible to separate "HDR" photography from "HDR" displays because they both do the same thing - fuck with contrast in different areas of an image differently in order to overcome limitations of the resolution/gamut of the format/display.

Wow ignorance and attitude what a lovely combination.

Neither inherently 'fuck with contrast'. HDR photography is just capturing a High Dynamic Range of values. So SDR would be 0.01 nits -> 100 nits. HDR would be 0.01 nits to 1,000 nits. Almost every decent camera today can capture at least that much dynamic range.

. The display you used as an example is "HDR" via the "Peak Illuminator" feature. It's just dimming the LED array, as all "HDR" displays are.

Nope. HDR is overdriving the LED array not dimming them. Yes, most HDR displays do use localized dimming but OLED doesn't, it just displays each pixel by itself and it can get up to 600+ nits which isn't as good as LED but every other pixel can be black black to 600 nits. Yes if you don't have enough LED resolution then there can be some localized tone mapping errors but on really good displays with 120+ zones the haloing of bright objects on dark is pretty subtle, comparable to flare in a good DLP rear projection display.

There is definitely a benefit to HDR. Just as it's different to look at a photograph of a street lamp vs looking at a street lamp, having that real peak values up in the thousands of nits gives your eyes and brain the illusion of being 'more real' because it's not trying to trick you into thinking you're looking at a bright object... the object is actually bright.

Re:What the?

[im_thatoneguy]

Full LED displays (NOT LCDs with LED backlights) can easily reproduce a wider range of colors if they use the right LEDs (some displays have added an extra color like yellow, some simply move the RGB LEDs further apart on the spectrum). Other display types can do this as well, but it's not as simple as with LEDs.

Full LED displays are only used in like ballpark score boards and billboards and their color is terrible. Unless you mean OLED, in which case just call it OLED. Almost every LCD display today uses a white LED and an array of filters.

Most "Full LED" displays are just 6500k LEDs with a colored filter. So a white LED + LCD filter array is pretty much the same as a white LED + Filter coating. 'Regular' LCDs are also just as good as OLED at color gamut if not better. You take a UV LED and you use quantum dot emission as your color mask and you have an incredibly pure color output. Which by the way is what you want out of your red green and blue primaries, not them "further apart" (further apart to where infrared, ultraviolet and... not sure where you want green to move to.). Rec2020's green isn't "further apart on the spectrum" compared to Rec709's green from blue it's just a narrower, more saturated green. It's a question of purity not 'distance'. Saturation is product of the width of the spectrum emitted not its wavelength.

I feared exactly this situation...

[Anonymous Coward]

First, NVIDIA comes out with their own implementation of variable refresh rates with G-SYNC, saying they'll never support AMD's approach. Then AMD digs their heels in, insisting that their support is more industry standard. Now, AMD is using "proprietary extensions" to enable it over HDMI, and you know that even if NVIDIA were secretly considering extending support to the AMD approach for DisplayPort, they sure as heck won't support AMD's extensions just to add support over HDMI.

As a nerd and a gamer, I feel like I stand to win nothing by any of this, and have to wait another 10 years for things to shake out. Ugh.

Re:I feared exactly this situation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stop buying AMD. End of problem. You get hardware that works and drivers that work. With AMD you get a bunch of specs that look great on paper but are often horrible in practice, as well as the shittiest drivers on the face of the earth.

Really you should have realized they're garbage as a company a long time ago.

Re:I feared exactly this situation...

[r1348]

There's nothing proprietary in those extensions since FreeSync is part of VESA standards. If anything, blame HDMI for not following VESA.

Re:I feared exactly this situation...

[Anonymous Coward]

And with nvidia, you get wood screws and temperatures that would make William Lord Kelvin blush.

Say what

[Kjella]

When source material is properly mapped to an HDR panel, colors are more accurately displayed

HDR = high dynamic range = difference of intensity between brightest and dimmest details, nothing to do with color. Well you could fuck with the colors to increase intensity because obviously you can only use 1/4 pixels in an RGBG pattern for red while you can use 4/4 for white, but I don't think anybody would make that trade-off. Rec. 2020 on the other hand will give you a wider color space and 10 bit color better accuracy, they're baked together in UHD broadcast/disc but HDR is just one part and not this part.

Re:Say what

[im_thatoneguy]

Brightness is important to color rendition. If you have a pure saturated red screen. But it's at 50 nits it's going to look like an unsaturated drab screen. Crank up that pure red screen to 5,000 nits and the color will be perceived as eye searing fire. If you can only ever reproduce a hue at 100 nits you're missing out on all colors which are very bright. Take a simple gradient: http://onlineteachingtoolkit.c...

If your display could only handle the bottom half of the luminance you wouldn't be able to reproduce the top "blue" blue it would always be a "deep blue".

Brightness is an additional dimension to the vibrance of color separate from the wider gamut and more saturated primaries of 2020. That's why we can express 3 dimensions to every color: hue, Saturation (Rec2020 primaries) and Value (HDR).

Also HDR adds 10bit color almost by necessity as much as Rec2020's larger gamut so HDR material is at least 10 bit.

Sync stability

[malx]

Extra bit depth is all very nice, but what I would really like from a new HDMI standard is faster, more stable syncing when switching resolutions and inputs. Any chance I'm more likely to see that with HDMI 2.0 devices than HDMI 1.3/1.4?

Or is this something caused by HDCP that HDMI can't fix?

Re: Sync stability

[Anonymous Coward]

For fuck sake, when are they going to make my computer smarter!?

Re:Sync stability

[im_thatoneguy]

Nooooope. I have a Vizio UHD tv and apparently fullscreen Netflix actually changes your display settings and even through 2.0 when I maximize or minimize the Netflix window I lose input and sometimes the TV completely loses sync and says "no Input" until you change to a different HDMI and back. Sadly it seems to have gotten way worse.

Vendor specific extensions != proprietary

[tepples]

Now, AMD is using "proprietary extensions" to enable it over HDMI

The featured article uses the term "vendor specific extensions". I imagine that AMD has every right to license this extension royalty-free to HDMI display manufacturers, just as it did for the DisplayPort version of FreeSync.

Have AMD announced...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when they will provide working Linux drivers?
As in working in 3D, and being able of running more than whatever quake 3 clone Phoronix benchmarks with...

wut duz this mean for??

[Anonymous Coward]

My macular-de-generation?

Freesync is AMD's Dynamic Refresh Rate Thing

[billstewart]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. FreeSync is AMD's answer to nVidia's G-Sync. They're both something about doing dynamic refresh rates, so you can use most of your speed updating things that change quickly instead of updating whole screens including the pixels that aren't changing very fast. It works over DisplayPort, but if you want to use HDMI you'll probably need to buy a new monitor (almost certainly your TV doesn't support it yet.) It's apparently marketed toward gamers.