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

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.

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.