Free Sync

[ATLASINCARNATE]

Will AMD's FreeSync work with Nvidia graphics cards?

[ForsakenLive]

Little is known about it on practice.

What makes it work is the VESA standard on displayport, and a compatible monitor + Drivers. If AMD enables it to other manufacturers, Nvidia could benefit from it. However I don't see that happening soon.

[TheNinjaNextDor]

Not as soon as on AMD cards because they will try to continue plugging G-Sync until it doesn't work anymore.

[Syntaxvgm]

Only if NVIDIA wants it to 

[GloriousPain]

AMD is making it Display port 1.4B standard... It's Nvidia's choice... AMD is making it fully open. 

[Guest]

Will AMD's FreeSync work with Nvidia graphics cards?

There's nothing stopping it, since freesync will be an open standard, and part of the displayport standard, but it does require nvidia to implement it in their hardware (not all displayport compatible cards automatically support freesync).

[papeles]

Will AMD's FreeSync work with Nvidia graphics cards?

AMD's freesync is more then just VESA standard adaptive sync.

 

Freesync won't work on nvidia gpu's but to some extend adaptive sync might. Keep in mind that not even gcn 1.0 gpu's(280x, for example) will not support freesync...

[jmaster299]

Ugh, soooooooo much misinformation being tossed around about this subject. I'm not going to dig up the link, but feel free to look through my old posts if you want to read the link yourself, but Adaptive Sync and Freesync are two separate technologies, and very few monitors will support them. This was discussed at length by a rep from ASUS who explained the technical details and explained why they were support GSync over Freesync and Adaptive Sync

Adaptive Sync is nothing more than a protocol being added to the DP 1.2a standard that will allow monitors and GPUs to communicate with each other if they both support a variable refresh rate. Just because a monitor or a GPU has a DP 1.2a port does not mean they will both support a variable refresh rate. For any monitor to support a variable refresh rate it will need special hardware, just like GSync does. That hardware won't be proprietary like the GSync hardware is, but it's not free either and will add to the cost of the monitor. 

For that variable refresh rate to work it will need two things, a way to communicate with the GPU that also supports a variable refresh rate, that's where Adaptive Sync comes in, and it will need a GPU that supports a variable refresh rate, and that's where Freesync comes in. As has already been pointed out, for a monitor to support this technology it will require special hardware, so Freesync is not exactly "free" like AMD and AMD fanboys like to claim. They make that false claim because AMD has said they will share their Freesync technology with other companies, but so far they have not made good on that promise. GSync does work slightly different and will not require any special connection to communicate between teh monitor and GPU for the variable refresh rate.

Part of the reason they have not shared Freesync with anyone else is because they haven't finished it yet. In the post by the ASUS rep that I mentioned before, he brought up the fact that it will be a year or more, from the time of his post, before Freesync is ready for market. They chose to back GSync mainly for that reason, because Nvidia was smart enough not to announce it until it was a finished product and ready to be released to manufacturers.

So, until AMD actually releases Freesync to the market, it's nothing more than an unfulfilled promise. There is also no way to say that GSync is more expensive, or to say which format performs better, until AMD actually releases something. Since, again, monitors will need additional hardware for the variable refresh rate to work and we don't know the specific science behind how Freesync will work. We already know that GSync will work via a strobing effect, meaning that GSync users will have to put up with motion blur for it to work.

[Guest]

@jmaster299

 

Yeah the 'Freesync' name is a bit of a misnomer. Like gsync, it does require both video card and the monitor to support it, but on the monitor side of things its an open VESA standard rather than a custom chip that only works with nvidia hardware, so its definitely superior to gsync in that regard IMO. Also, afaik there's nothing proprietary about the GPU support for freesync...AMD has stated that intel/nvidia could implement this with no restrictions or licensing fees (see comments from richard huddy in the interview linked below). Also, many of AMD's cards already support it on the GPU side (Almost all their APU's, and all of the R9 cards except the 280x and 270x), so for some AMD owners only a monitor upgrade will be required.

 

 

I did see an interview recently with AMD's richard huddy where he commented about 'FreeSync'/Gsync here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fZGV5z8YFM8#t=3717 (starting at 1 hour 1 minute in). 

 

Some notable points from his comments: 

 

1. freesync shouldn't be difficult/expensive for monitor manufacturers to support. He said that it simply requires the monitor manufacturers to 'build the monitor in a slightly different way' to support adaptive sync. He also said the support on the GPU side 'isn't terribly complicated', and it could even be possible that chips that already support eDP could have the potential to support freesync (intel chips), since freesync is derived from the adaptive refresh spec in embedded display port, but that only intel could confirm that (obviously).

 

2. He claims freesync has no additional latency, and that gsync has additional latency in comparison because of the way it communicates with the monitor, and how it uses a 768mb memory buffer on the monitor side, inducing an extra frame of latency. He says freesync works plug and play, no handshaking, no additional buffer.

 

3. R9 290 cards, R9 260 cards, and all AMD APU's support freesync hardware.

 

4. No restrictions to when intel/nvidia can implement freesync support, and no license fees

 

 

 

 

 

My personal opinion on gsync: I definitely give nvidia credit for pushing the market in this direction (who knows if we would have ever seen 'freesync', had nvidia not come out with gsync). Gsync definitely kicked off the adaptive refresh rate trend for desktop gaming, which is a good thing, because video tearing/vsync is something that hasn't been given nearly enough focus in pc gaming IMO.

 

However, I really dislike the way Nvidia implemented gsync. By getting the the market first, and implementing gsync as a completely proprietary solution, it allowed them to:

 

1. scoop up the early adopter market who are willing to pay a big premium for this technology.

 

2. Lock these early adopters into the nvidia ecosystem. If someone has a gsync monitor, you can bet their future gpu upgrades will also be nvidia, or else they will lose their nice adaptive refresh rate, because they are conveniently locked into a completely proprietary solution!

 

Nvidia did a good thing by introducing tech to improve vsync, and pushing the market in that direction, but did a terrible thing by making it a totally proprietary solution. The market could be forever segmented between freesync/gsync if nvidia decides not to also support the open Adaptive Sync standard, which would definitely a *bad* thing for consumers, because it means their GPU choice/monitor choice is limited if they want this feature.

 

But of course time will tell which solution works better, only way to know for sure is when freesync monitors come to market and can be reviewed/compared to gsync.