Hardware AMD FreeSync Officially Launches

Hopefully this will lower the price of gsync monitors so the nvidia markup is pretty small, or they might decide to support freesync.

Not sure how big the markup is however - for example rog swift might be expensive, but that's not just gsync. If you compare it to the cheaper 144hz freesync panels you'll note that:
(a) the rog swift goes down to 30hz where as the freesync only go to 40hz. 40hz is too high, the whole point of variable sync is to smooth stuff out at lower fps. The 75hz freesync ones seem to be even worse only going as low as 48fps which seems a bit useless.
(b) the rog swift has much less ghosting, probably because it's spec'd as a 3d vision monitor. Ghosting is also important to most gamers.

Hence if you build a freesync monitor with the rog's internals the price would be higher (but not as high as the current one, which will hopefully drop when it gets some proper competition).

 

Is this yet another one of AMD's 'next big things'?

..hows Bulldozer and Mantle doing?

So excuse the cynicism but AMD have form, or not as the case maybe.

 

When you guys get a FreeSync monitor for review, it'd be interesting to see if it'd work with those controversial modded Nvidia drivers that turned out to be a modified version of the experimental Mobile G-sync Nvidia drivers, or something like that.

 

It refers to some dude who was given pre release drivers on his laptop which enabled gsync in spite of the laptop not having a gsync module.

 

I think this might be what he is referring to.

 

Exactly, I should have included a link. Thanks!

 

I wish this is gonna be implemented in some models of TVs in the future. Lot of people are using TVs for gaming, like me.
And here's a question, is there any way that freesync could be working on X1,PS4? since they both use AMD hardware.

 

Poor show who ever didn't send Bit-Tech some review samples.

Not that you/we can confirm anything due to the lack of review samples but from what I've read elsewhere the biggest difference is in the lower FPS ranges, once you start to go above 75fps the advantages become less noticeable.

 

Interesting article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...-display-tech-is-superior-to-amds-freesync/2/

Two things:
1) Under the min fps which freesync/gsync allows freesync just sticks to that min frame rate (e.g. 40) causing very bad juddering. gsync goes to multiples (e.g. for 29fps it might run the monitor at 58fps) which leads to a much smoother look at low fps.
2) freesync monitors ghost, gsync are much better. To stop ghosting you use overdrive which means you push the pixels brighter then they need to be. That has to be tuned both to a particular panel and a particular refresh rate (i.e. panel X at fps of 47 needs overdrive Y for a colour Z). Freesync can't do this at the moment and has to turn off overrdrive, gsync can hence the lower ghosting.

 

I highly recommend PC Per's video on the comparison between them. I'm on a phone so CBA with the necessary linkage. NVIDIAs module has sold gsync for me. At present AMD can't handle low frame rates outside the sweet spot. Whilst the gsync module doubles up on the frames in order to keep things smooth Plus the extra ghosting doesn't help either. I think the benefits are worth the cost.

Although I'd really like to see some gsync monitors with more than one input even though they won't have gsync on the extra inputs.

It would also be nice if the module could be an external dongle which could be used with the extended display port spec. Unlikely to happen but one can dream.