Hello. I was just having a think. While i have a feeling it will never happen, as gsync seems to be too profitable for them. But if nvidia did ever descide to support freesync, what do we think it would take to get it working? Would it be as simple as a driver update or do we think there are hardware changes that would need to be made?
Ok accuse me of nitpicking by all means, but this just shows how successful AMD's marketing of Freesync has been, even though I fairly sure AMD never thought it would work out this well for themselves.
NVidia will never support Freesync, because Freesync is a proprietary AMD technology. Now Vesa's Adaptive-Sync is the open standard that allows AMD to utilise the hardware in their cards to give us the variable refresh rate.
AMD coined the term Freesync because of
A, no royalty fees on Vesa'a Adaptive-Sync
B, no large extra cost for the monitor makers to include a proprietary module (ie the Gsync module) in the monitor.
Now of course you still need a Adaptive-Sync capable scaler in the monitor, but as we have seen these result in much cheaper monitors than the GSync equivalents and as we are now seeing more and more monitors are including an Adaptive-Sync scaler anyway, it gives them a chance to put Freesync on the box to get a few more sales.
Now both FreeSync and Gsync work over DisplayPort, but as far as I know only Freesync works over HDMI. I believe that GSync doesn't currently work over HDMI due to bandwidth limitations, but I might be wrong there. This will change with HDMI 2.1 as it allows much higher bandwidth then 2.0.
Now of course up to now, the Vesa Adaptive-Sync open standard has been a optional part of the DisplayPort and HDMI standards, but this is soon to change with the new upcoming HDMI 2.1 standard as VRR (variable refresh rate) isn't an optional part like it is with DisplayPort.
Now NVidia hardware to utilise Vesa's Adaptive-Sync is definitely present in NVidia cards as the laptops that are GSync capable don't have a GSync module in them.
You can see that AMD have reined in the monitor manufactures somewhat by being much more stringent with the requirements for Freesync 2 monitors, as their were some real shockers in the early stages of Freesync monitors, with tiny ranges, but things are much better now with most monitors.
Eventually you would have to assume that NVidia will use HDMI 2.1 ports on their cards at some point, maybe even in the upcoming 11xx series, but will they utilise VVR over HDMI, who knows, maybe it would be GSync lite, or some thing.
It will be interesting when AMD use HDMI 2.1 because obviously as I said early DisplayPort has no Royalty fees, but HDMI does and I cannot see AMD suddenly calling it NQSFS (Not Quite so Free Sync), I actually expect they will just ignore the fees, as they are already paying them for HDMI 2.0 anyway.
What ever happens, it certainly going to be interesting over the next year or so in the monitor world.