There have been conflicting reports over when the first Freesync monitors (AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s G-Sync) will be launched. We have heard both Q1’15 (Display Monitor Vol 21 No 37) and Q4’14 (Display Monitor Vol 21 No 42). AMD has now revealed that the first UltraHD units equipped with the technology will be launched by Samsung in March next year. The 23.6″/28″ UD590 (Display Monitor Vol 21 No 3) and 23.6″/27″/31.5″ UE850 will both feature Freesync.
Meanwhile, the Q4’14 rumour also appears to have some truth to it. Sources speaking to Fudzilla have said that BenQ and ViewSonic (we heard about this in September; see Display Monitor Vol 21 No 35) are planning to launch Freesync monitors this year.
While we do not know the specifications of the BenQ and ViewSonic screens, some conclusions can be drawn. Scaler suppliers MStar, Novatek and Realtek are offering Freesync-compatible receivers supporting 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 resolutions at 144Hz, and UltraHD at 60Hz.
Display Daily Comments
In an interview, Robert Hallock of AMD explained that VESA’s Adaptive Sync open standard (Display Monitor Vol 21 No 20), which is now built into DisplayPort 1.2, is enabled by Freesync. Adaptive Sync enables display refresh rate control by a graphics card, but requires a GPU-side technology (Freesync) to provide the user-facing benefits; these include tearing-free and low-latency gameplay. (TA)
