HDMI 2.1 VRR AMD FreeSync nVidia G-SYNC 4K TV explained

melmac · 22 Jun 2018 at 12:32

pandem0nium said:
March 2013 was the launch of the first freesync capable card. HD 7790.

Well done, I completely forgot about this card.

pandem0nium · 22 Jun 2018 at 12:43

melmac said:
Well done, I completely forgot about this card.

Cheers. Most people have done tbf. It was like a field test for GCN 1.1. It also had a true audio chip on the hardware but it was disabled.

ubersonic · 22 Jun 2018 at 12:49

nashathedog said:
G-sync was developed and released before VRR was available, It's from G-sync that AMD came up with the idea of having the VRR ability added to the DP standard.

Neither of these are true.

VRR was available before G-Sync was developed, Nvidia pioneered the use of VRR in laptops and developed G-Sync as a desktop variant (as they believed at the time that VRR was an inferior method).

AMD didn't come up with the idea of having the VRR ability added to the DP standard that was already in the pipe when G-Sync was revealed/launched, AMD just made noise about it (and arguably sped up the implementation).

melmac · 22 Jun 2018 at 13:11

ubersonic said:
Neither of these are true.

VRR was available before G-Sync was developed, Nvidia pioneered the use of VRR in laptops and developed G-Sync as a desktop variant (as they believed at the time that VRR was an inferior method).

AMD didn't come up with the idea of having the VRR ability added to the DP standard that was already in the pipe when G-Sync was revealed/launched, AMD just made noise about it (and arguably sped up the implementation).

VRR wasn't available as a gaming feature before Gsync, it was only a power saving feature. Nvidia only bought VRR to laptops after Gysnc was released in desktops. And then it wasn't really Gsync, it was just using the Embedded display port standard that already existed ie. It's basically adaptive sync.

AMD did come up with the idea of adding adaptive sync to the desktop display port specification. AMD wrote the proposal and submitted it in November 2013.

nashathedog · 22 Jun 2018 at 14:19

melmac said:
It's not just for PC gamers. The Xbox one supports VRR right now.

LambChop said:
Did not know that, thats good to know

With AMD hardware in the consoles and Navi likely to be in the next gen consoles including Freesync in tv's will hopefully be seen as an important addition to improve the casual gaming experience.

ubersonic said:
Neither of these are true.

VRR was available before G-Sync was developed, Nvidia pioneered the use of VRR in laptops and developed G-Sync as a desktop variant (as they believed at the time that VRR was an inferior method).

We're talking about it's use as a G-sync alternative, I already make that distinction in an earlier post, Yes VRR's been around a lot longer but I'm talking about it's ability to be used in the way Freesync uses it, After G-sync was announced AMD pushed for the upcoming displayport standard to support the use of VRR as a G-sync alternative.

ubersonic said:
AMD didn't come up with the idea of having the VRR ability added to the DP standard that was already in the pipe when G-Sync was revealed/launched, AMD just made noise about it (and arguably sped up the implementation).

Lot's of tech's & features are talked about and then they sit on the back burner until they have to move forward with it to remain relevant, DX12 is a good example, It was talked about for years but never made an appearance until after the low level Mantle api came to market threatening Direct X's market dominance. VRR for gaming's no different, If G-sync hadn't been announced when it was AMD wouldn't of pushed as a matter of urgency to get the VRR gaming feature available with the soon to release at that time Displayport 1.2a standard.

melmac · 22 Jun 2018 at 15:34

nashathedog said:
If G-sync hadn't been announced when it was AMD wouldn't of pushed as a matter of urgency to get the VRR gaming feature available with the soon to release at that time Displayport 1.2a standard.

The only thing AMD rushed was their announcement and demo at CES in January 2014, I believe they had no intention of announcing Adaptive sync until they had things better setup. The demo was terrible. They couldn't really rush anything else. They had to get certification first. Then they had to work with monitor and scalar manufacturers to get them on board and build monitors/scalers for adaptive sync. That takes a lot of time.

We will never know for sure, but, maybe Nvidia were the ones to jump early. You could certainly argue a case for it. Remember they are on the board of Directors of Vesa, any changes to the display port certification they would have known about. Is it just coincidence that Nvidia announced Gsync just a few weeks before AMD submitted their proposal? Why not wait until CES in January? Remember they had no monitors available to buy for months. And that's not like Nvidia. The only thing they had was a Gsync module that you could install yourself on one Asus monitor, but that only came out 3 months after the announcement. Think it was 7 months after that again before the first monitors arrived.

Display port 1.2a was already out, it came out earlier in 2013. Adding the optional adaptive sync to the standard didn't happen until May 2014.

bru · 22 Jun 2018 at 19:29

melmac said:
The only thing AMD rushed was their announcement and demo at CES in January 2014, I believe they had no intention of announcing Adaptive sync until they had things better setup. The demo was terrible. They couldn't really rush anything else. They had to get certification first. Then they had to work with monitor and scalar manufacturers to get them on board and build monitors/scalers for adaptive sync. That takes a lot of time.

That kinda rewrites the whole Freesync doesn't need any special scaler argument.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 22 Jun 2018 at 22:38

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8008...andard-variable-refresh-monitors-move-forward

The last half-year or so has seen the concept of variable refresh desktop monitors advance rather quickly. After sitting on the technology backburner for a number of years, the issue came to the forefront of the PC graphics industry late last year when NVIDIA announced G-Sync, the first such desktop implementation (and unfortunately proprietary implementation) of the concept. AMD in turn fired back at NVIDIA at CES this year, demonstrating their FreeSync concept, which could implement variable refresh through features found in the embedded DisplayPort (eDP) standard. Since then the technology has been in something of a holding pattern – NVIDIA and their partners are still prepping retail G-Sync monitors, meanwhile AMD and the VESA have needed to bridge the specification gap between eDP and DisplayPort.

To that end, the VESA sends word today that they have done just that with the latest update to the DisplayPort 1.2a standard. Adaptive-Sync (not to be confused with NVIDIA’s Adaptive V-Sync), the eDP feature that allows for variable refresh monitors, has been added to the DisplayPort 1.2a standard as an optional feature. We’ve been expecting this addition since AMD first announced their FreeSync concept, however until now it wasn’t clear whether Adaptive-Sync would first be added to DisplayPort 1.2a or rolled into the forthcoming DisplayPort 1.3 standard, so we’re glad to see that it’s the former rather than the latter.

With the standard now having been settled, this frees up GPU manufacturers and display manufacturers to move forward on implementing it in hardware and drivers. The good news is that the underlying technology is fairly old – eDP was ratified in 2009 – so while we’re not accustomed to seeing Adaptive-Sync on desktop hardware, there are GPU and display/controller manufacturers who have experience with the technology. That said, since this feature isn’t present in today’s display controllers there’s still a need to iterate on the hardware and its firmware, even if it’s just making small modifications to existing designs (this being the advantage of doing a DP 1.2a extension).

AMD for their part sent over a notice that they’re already working with display manufacturers to get the technology into future monitors, with their estimate being 6-12 months for Adaptive-Sync capable displays to hit the market. There’s no real precedent for this kind of change, so it’s hard to say just what a realistic number within that window is; but historically vendors have been slow to update their hardware for new DisplayPort standards, and NVIDIA’s own efforts have still taken many months even with NVIDIA’s extra muscle and close relationship. With that in mind we suspect 12 months is more realistic than 6, though we’d be happy to be wrong.

Meanwhile the VESA for their part is touting the full range of benefits for Adapative-Sync. This includes both the gaming angle that NVIDIA and AMD have recently been pushing and the power savings angle that drove the creation of Adaptive-Sync and eDP in the first place. Admittedly the power gains are miniscule and generally unimportant for a desktop scenario, but they are there. Outside of gaming what’s more interesting is the ability to apply Adaptive-Sync to video playback, allowing for the elimination of the judder that’s common when playing back 24fps/25fps content on today’s 60Hz displays.

Along with the addition of Adaptive-Sync to the DisplayPort standard, the VESA will also be putting together a new (yet to be revealed) logo for the technology. Since Adaptive-Sync is an optional feature not every DisplayPort device will support it, so those devices that do support it will sport a logo to visibility indicate their compliance. The logo will go hand-in-hand with the VESA’s forthcoming Adaptive-Sync compliance test, so manufacturers will need to pass the test before they’re able to use the logo.

Moving on, coinciding with today’s announcement from the VESA AMD sent along their own release on the subject. In it, AMD notes that they’re immediately preparing for Adaptive-Sync, though they will be continuing to promote it under the FreeSync brand. AMD is telling us that as of this point most of their GCN 1.1 products will support Adaptive-Sync, including the desktop Radeon 290 and 260 series, along with most of AMD’s current APUs: Beema/Mullins, Kaveri (AMD had mistakenly omitted this from their list), and even the GCN 1.0 Kabini/Temesh. Meanwhile AMD has not yet commented on whether their GCN 1.0 video cards will support Adaptive-Sync, so the outcome of that remains to be seen. But for all of the supported products the underlying hardware is already Adaptive-Sync capable, so it’s just a matter of AMD rolling out support for it in their drivers.

AMD’s release also contains an interesting note on supported refresh rates: “Potential ranges include 36-240Hz, 21-144Hz, 17-120Hz and 9-60Hz.” While the upper-bounds of those ranges are in-line with numbers we’ve seen before, the sub-30Hz refresh rates on the other hand are unexpected. As you might recall from our look at G-Sync, even though LCD monitors don’t suffer from anything quite like phosphor decay as CRT monitors do, there is still a need to periodically refresh an LCD to keep the pixels from drifting. As a result G-Sync has a minimum refresh rate of 30Hz, whereas AMD is explicitly promising lower refresh rates. Since the pixel drift issue is an underlying issue with the LCD technology there is presumably something in Adaptive-Sync to compensate for this – the display is likely initiating a self-refresh – though at the end of the day the variable refresh rate means that you can always set the refresh rate to a multiple of the targeted refresh rate and get the same results.

Finally, we also had a brief chat with NVIDIA about whether they would support Adaptive-Sync on current generation hardware. NVIDIA tells us that they can’t comment at this time since there aren’t any Adaptive-Sync displays available. It’s entirely possible this is just NVIDIA being coy, however like all device vendors they do have to pass the VESA’s compliance tests. So if nothing else NVIDIA’s “no comment” is technically correct: until they pass that test they are limited in what they can say about being Adaptive-Sync compliant.

Though while we’re on the subject, this also brings up the matter of NVIDIA’s competing G-Sync technology. Because of NVIDIA’s head-start on the variable refresh concept with G-Sync, for the next year or so they will continue to be the only vendor with retail support for variable refresh. The modified Asus monitors have been available for a few months now, and the retail G-Sync monitors are still due this quarter the last we heard from NVIDIA. So until Adaptive-Sync monitors hit the market G-Sync is the only option.

Ultimately it remains to be seen what will become of G-Sync – NVIDIA seems to be in this for the long haul as part of their broader ecosystem plans – and there is the matter of whether the technical differences between Adaptive-Sync and G-Sync result in meaningful performance differences between the two technologies. With that said, even if NVIDIA keeps G-Sync around we would hope to see them support Adaptive-Sync just as well as AMD.

https://vesa.org/

VESA Vision
VESA’s vision is continual growth in technical standards development and evolution into an international trade association, with a world-wide membership driving standards initiatives, product implementations, and market implementation.

VESA Mission Statement
VESA’s mission is to develop, promote and support an ecosystem of vendors and certified, interoperable products for the electronics industry.

Stable and growing membership, especially in Asia

240+ member companies worldwide

Continuing to deliver our mission:

Develop, promote, and support an ecosystem of vendors and certified, interoperable products for the electronics industry

Board of Directors
Alan Kobayashi, Chairman, Apple

Syed Athar Hussain, Vice Chairman, AMD

Craig Wiley, Secretary/Treasurer, Parade Technologies

Zach Hamm, Intel

Do Kyun Kim, LG Electronics

Pablo Ortega, NVIDIA

Open Seat

melmac · 22 Jun 2018 at 23:43

bru said:
That kinda rewrites the whole Freesync doesn't need any special scaler argument.

There was never an argument that adaptive sync didn't need special scalers. It was whether there were monitors out there that supported it already because of D.P 1.2a. Some monitors did have scalers that could have worked with adaptive sync but the monitor manufacturers didn't provide the firmware to upgrade them. Iiyama came closest to actually offering a firmware upgrade. You sent the monitor to them and they would upgrade the firmware and send it back to you. It was announced here on these forums, but, Iiyama eventually decided not to do it.

jigger · 23 Jun 2018 at 16:11

melmac said:
There was never an argument that adaptive sync didn't need special scalers. It was whether there were monitors out there that supported it already because of D.P 1.2a. Some monitors did have scalers that could have worked with adaptive sync but the monitor manufacturers didn't provide the firmware to upgrade them. Iiyama came closest to actually offering a firmware upgrade. You sent the monitor to them and they would upgrade the firmware and send it back to you. It was announced here on these forums, but, Iiyama eventually decided not to do it.

A few firms did. I can't remember the brand but it was one of the overclockable 27" screens. The Korean off brands offered Freesync updates too. Catleap, wasabi mango and so on.

bru · 23 Jun 2018 at 16:28

melmac said:
There was never an argument that adaptive sync didn't need special scalers. It was whether there were monitors out there that supported it already because of D.P 1.2a. Some monitors did have scalers that could have worked with adaptive sync but the monitor manufacturers didn't provide the firmware to upgrade them. Iiyama came closest to actually offering a firmware upgrade. You sent the monitor to them and they would upgrade the firmware and send it back to you. It was announced here on these forums, but, Iiyama eventually decided not to do it.

There was lots of arguments on here at the time about it, the fact that it didn't need special scalers was one of the big arguments of it being free.

melmac · 23 Jun 2018 at 18:05

bru said:
There was lots of arguments on here at the time about it, the fact that it didn't need special scalers was one of the big arguments of it being free.

No, the only people that were arguing were the usual suspects that kept banging on about Freesync not been free and that you would still have to buy the monitor.

Their arguments were ridiculous. The Free came from the Manufacturers not having to pay Royalties to VESA or AMD to implement Adaptive sync. It was nothing to do with the cost of the monitor.

bru · 24 Jun 2018 at 10:49

melmac said:
No, the only people that were arguing were the usual suspects that kept banging on about Freesync not been free and that you would still have to buy the monitor.

So that is a 'NO' followed by yes thier were people arguing about it, OK got it.

melmac · 24 Jun 2018 at 12:41

bru said:
So that is a 'NO' followed by yes thier were people arguing about it, OK got it.

*sigh*

There was never any arguments about whether Adaptive sync needed a scaler. The arguments were about the "Free" in Freesync.

tommybhoy · 24 Jun 2018 at 13:31

And yet another AS thread regurgitating the same old pros/cons/total misinformation pushed as fact in the topic of G v's FREE, both of them should be applauded, buy into it/don't buy into it and reap the benefit of AS gaming if you do.

LuckyBenski · 24 Jun 2018 at 13:39

tommybhoy said:
And yet another AA thread regurgitating the same old pros/cons/total misinformation pushed as fact in the topic of G v's FREE, both of them should be applauded, buy into it/don't buy into it and reap the benefit of AA gaming if you do.

What's AA?

tommybhoy · 24 Jun 2018 at 14:10

LuckyBenski said:
What's AA?

It's auto correct being a pita, corrected it to AS-Adaptive Sync, thanks.

r7slayer · 24 Jun 2018 at 14:21

Rroff said:
I can't see it being a big swing factor for AMD unless they come out with much more price/performance competitive GPUs - maybe a little more movement their way in the 580/1060 bracket but that could be short lived depending on what nVidia do next.

consoles would. Xbox One X would benefit greatly from these TVs which tbh TVs are better suited for consoles. A desktop monitor would take a long time to be replaced by a TV for most PC gamers.

LoadsaMoney · 24 Jun 2018 at 14:55

LuckyBenski said:
What's AA?

Antialiasing

Calo · 3 Jul 2018 at 01:31

Seems the cheapest 4K native 120hz TV with VRR enabled over HDMI 2.0 is the Samsung NU8000 (NU8500 if you like a curved one) I would wait till the competition inevitably catches up with the HDMI 2.0 VRR updates mind as only Samsung have supported this so far! Problem is only nVidia has GPUs that can really push 4k at 60hz or more. So maybe we need to wait until either nVidia support VRR on TV sets (doesn't have to be supporting AMD's own FreeSync) or AMD release a 1080ti beater next year!

Question, would we still get just as much screen tearing if the VRR was only between 48-60hz at 4K - as its reported to be over HDMI 2.0? https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/nu8500