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.

Comments

Re:Can someone please explain?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Can someone please explain?

[Gadget_Guy]

Freesync 2 is all about adding HDR support for the existing Freesync standard. There is more information in the arstechnica article:

HDR on PC is a more complex beast than just panel brightness, though. First, a game performs colour tone mapping after an engine renders a scene. Then, when the frame is passed to a monitor, it's tone-mapped yet again to fit the display's supported colour range. That may or may not be the same colour space required by HDR10 or Dolby Vision. This two-stage process takes time and introduces latency.

With FreeSync 2, AMD is removing the second step, connecting the game engine directly to the HDR display. When you plug in a FreeSync 2 display, the display announces its HDR capabilities, and the AMD graphics driver will shuttle that information over to the game engine. This ensures that gamers get the best possible image quality, because the game tone-maps to the screen's native colour space, while also reducing input lag. Unfortunately, it also means that in order for FreeSync 2 and HDR to work, AMD needs the specific colour and brightness capabilities of every FreeSync 2 monitor, while games and video players must be enabled via AMD's API. AMD is going to have to win over a lot of hardware partners to make FreeSync 2 a reality.

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.