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AMD Debuts Radeon FreeSync 2 For Gaming Displays With Stunning Image Quality (venturebeat.com)
AMD announced Tuesday it is introducing Radeon FreeSync 2, a new display technology that will enable monitors to show the exact intended image pixels that a game or other application wants to. The result will be better image quality for gamers, according to AMD. From a report on VentureBeat: With the FreeSync 2 specification, monitor makers will be able to create higher-quality monitors that build on the two-year-old FreeSync technology. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD is on a quest for "pixel perfection," said David Glen, senior fellow at AMD, in a press briefing. With FreeSync 2, you won't have to mess with your monitor's settings to get the perfect setting for your game, Glen said. It will be plug-and-play, deliver brilliant pixels that have twice as much color gamut and brightness over other monitors, and have low-latency performance for high-speed games. AMD's FreeSync technology and Nvidia's rival G-Sync allow a graphics card to adjust the monitor's refresh rate on the fly, matching it to the computer's frame rate. This synchronization prevents the screen-tearing effect -- with visibly mismatched graphics on different parts of the screen -- which happens when the refresh rate of the display is out of sync with the computer.
It doesn't. This is a blatantly misleading (and therefore presumably bought-and-paid-for by AMD) article.
Can someone please explain how FreeSync2 has any influence at all on any of that?
FreeSync 2 comes with a developer API that will let developers access a HDR pipeline on non-HDR operating systems (that's the extended gamut and brightness bit) while skipping the HDR display's layer of tone mapping (that's the lower latency). If the developers don't do anything or you already do HDR, you only get the latter. And they can do that because FreeSync 2 monitors tell the GPU what HDR capabilities they have so the GPU can deliver a custom tailored output and the monitor display it unprocessed.
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This Freesync 2 technology should be able to give you the best possible response time your display is capable of without artifacts (i.e. no tearline).
The way rendering works is by using a double buffer. The back buffer is the canvas where the GPU draws the picture where the front buffer contain the completed previous frame, intended for display. When the GPU part of the drawing is complete, the buffers are swapped.
Further down, the RAMDAC (is it still how it is called?) scans the front buffer and send the data to the monitor, line by line. The monitor then processes the data and displays the image.
The problem with the usual fixed framerate is that the scanning is a continuous process, going top down ($refresh_rate) times per second no matter how fast the GPU is drawing new frames, which mean that the image may change mid-display, creating a tearline effect. To avoid this, it is possible to wait for the drawing to complete but it causes lag (that's vsync). It mean that gamers had to choose between an ugly tearline and increased lag.
Freesync/G-Sync fix the problem by synchronizing the GPU rendering, RAMDAC scanning and display. So when a frame is complete, the scanning starts immediately afterwards and the monitor starts the display process at the same time. If the monitor is able to follow, there is no extra lag.
Freesync 2 goes a step further and addresses the data processing part of the monitor. Unlike old CRTs, modern monitors do plenty of things before lighting up pixels : contrast, scaling, color correction, etc..., and it can cause more lag. This is too bad because it is something your GPU can do better and faster. And it is exactly what Freesync 2 does : it takes some image processing out of the monitor and on to the GPU where it belongs.
Freesync 2 is all about adding HDR support for the existing Freesync standard. There is more information in the arstechnica article:
So they are getting more colours by mandating HDR and increasing performance by removing a stage from the rendering process by allowing the game to use to exact colour space of the monitor.
Since when ever was this NOT happening? , specially with digital interfaces such as HDMI.
Consumer-level LCD monitors don't show the full colour gamut. It varies between monitors exactly how much of the computer's idea of the colour range can be displayed. This will only get more complicated as monitors start offering HDR.
FreeSync 2 allows the monitor to tell the computer exactly what it can display so the graphic cards can output the exact colours that can are supported. This eliminates the need for the monitor to convert the video's colours on the fly. Supposedly this makes it faster to display, although given how fast monitors are now I'm not sure how much difference it will make.