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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.
Take our word for it folks, we have all the pixels!
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.
Can someone please explain how FreeSync2 has any influence at all on any of that?
(Except possibly increase latency slightly, because you can only delay drawing through synchronization, never display what hasn't been rendered yet.)
One thing is not related to the other.
Freesync is just a way to handle variant refreshes without screen tearing. Those refreshes can happen faster or slower. If a refresh happens faster than the LCDs can make the transition (which is rare, and only will really be an issue on whole scene changes, and likely you'll never see ghosting anyway), it will still happen.
That said, Sync tech has to do with human perception of changes that respond more precisely, and eliminating stutter (which happens because the refresh can't occur at the cyclical vertical refresh, which is mostly an artifact of CRT tech anyway). It is frustrating that nvidia has pushed proprietary sync tech that is costly to implement, rather than go with "Free Sync" which only requires firmware changes for most basic monitor controllers.
It seems like AMD's real push here is to maintain Free Sync capability as monitor manufacturers increase the color gamut and enhance LCD response times.
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.
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.
Many monitors do not support the full color spectrum, instead they dither colors to be 'closer'. This can cause unwanted artifacts. Also it will make some pixels 'not what the computer software intended'. Using a digital interface such as hdmi or displayport will not help in this case.
Essentially, g/freesync is variable refresh rate capability. This is different than the old fixed refresh standard which comes from the old days of CRT refresh strobes. Regardless of what the video chip was doing, the screen had to be refreshed before the phosphor decayed too much or all the eye would see is a flickering mess. The 'multisync' monitors that came later still operated at fixed rates once a mode was set (60hz, 75, 120 etc). LCD panels mimicked this behavior to retain compatibility with established video standards but there's no reason for them to be bound by this limitation. The benefit of gpu driven refresh is that it offers lower latency for applications that can't render at a high fixed refresh rate on the hardware. Because the gpu no longer has to skip frames waiting for the monitor's next cycle, all are displayed, resulting in the smoothest progression of motion possible.
Theoretically, this is also a boon for emulators of hardware that used oddball or variable refresh rates.
you understand that g-sync is a objectively inferior standard when it comes to latency right? Because it requires additional hardware processing on the display's end to enable g-sync. Whereas FreeSync makes use of an optional ISO standard extension for LCD screens (that was mostly designed for laptops as a battery saving measure but is now being used on desktops for stopping screen tear) and therefore doesn't require any additional hardware cost.
Say what you want about 'support' (I personally have opinions about anti-trust/anti-consumer practices that I whole-hardheartedly believe nvidia has done on purpose http://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing/2 to make games run slower on all systems, but slowest on ATI/AMD cards (Due to ATI/AMD cards being better at particle effects than nvidia cards, but less strong on poly counts... so nvidia pushes everything to have stupidly high poly counts when it doesn't need it..)) ... but back on topic...
Say what you want about 'support', but AMD's contributions to the open source (mantle -> openGL's replacement: vulkan), freesync (which monitors could EASILY support ALONG with gysnc ... but nvidia won't license its gysnc to any manf. who wants to do that...(again, might be good business, but anti-consumer and I'd argue anti-trust issue)) along with a lot of other technical specifications over the last ...ohh 4~5 years (HBM memory among them) far out weighs in my opinion the crap nvidia has pushed onto society with its practices...
A RAMDAC is used for analog signals. Digital signals don't use a Digital to Analog Converter.
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