Acer (TPE: 2353) announced Tuesday that it’s planning to release the XG270HU gaming monitor, a 27-inch display that has QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution, a fast 144Hz refresh rate and a 1ms response time.

Keen observers of the company’s releases might be confused. During January’s Consumer Electronics Show Acer announced the same thing, down to the connectivity (HDMI 2.0 port, Dual-Link DVI and DisplayPort 1.2a). However, this Feburary re-release has one key difference: the monitor supports the open source FreeSync from AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and not Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) G-Sync.

The difference between FreeSync and G-Sync is one uses open standards and DisplayPort, while the other uses proprietary components that are licensed to the monitor manufacturer. While Nvidia would argue strongly that G-Sync has technical advantages over FreeSync, for most users the difference is negligible.

The difference, however, comes down to the cost to manufacturers — which is thus passed on to consumers. Unless Nvidia delivers a strong incentives packages to companies to include G-Sync in their monitors, they will simply opt for the open source alternative. Why? Because they can pass the savings on to consumers.

It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of a trend, or write the postmortem for G-Sync. Nvidia didn’t have much luck pushing out 3D Vision 2, which also required manufacturers to sign-on to include proprietary hardware in their monitors. Granted, consumers didn’t have much enthusiasm for 3D gaming — particularly if it required them to use a monitor which included proprietary technology.

Acer’s move is a vote of confidence for FreeSync, but not an outright rejection of Nvidia’s G-Sync. It will at least take another two or three quarters to get the first glimpse of a winner in the adaptive sync battle.

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With the annual Consumer Electronics Show right around the corner and the industry’s marketing efforts going into overdrive, what is it that we will likely see next week?

It’s a safe bet that if will be a week of opposites.

From hardware going to both larger and smaller designs, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) G-Sync versus AMD (NYSE: AMD) FreeSync, small displays with massive resolution, and gaming notebooks of both massive and diminutive sizes.

Small form factor hardware as is one of the fastest growing areas in the hardware segment, and no doubt there will be a lot of it on display at CES.  With hardware becoming so powerful and small we are seeing a lot of really powerful builds that can be done.  With even MATX X99 boards we are seeing that there is a move toward making things small and potent.  On the other side there is a lot of huge pieces of hardware showing up on the market, namely 4K and ultra wide monitors.  They are becoming even more prolific and the ultra wide monitors are drawing a lot of interest from gamers and power users who were once planning on going for a 4K monitor or two.  There will be a lot of talk this CES about AMD’s FreeSync for enthusiast gaming monitors as it is the newcomer challenging Nvidia’s established G-Sync.  FreeSync will draw the attention of monitor manufacturers since it is less costly to implement and license than the G-Sync solution.  The LG 34UM67 will be a curved ultra wide monitor that will feature AMD’s FreeSync, and should definitely steal a lot of the spotlight next week.

The mobile computing segment is also something to watch next week as we will see a lot of small notebooks with very high resolution displays.  It is easy to say that there will be a number of notebook models that will feature 3K and 4K screens, even at the 15.6-inch sizes.  There will also be a movement with ultraportable gaming notebooks of small size that can be docked with a desktop graphics card for superior gaming ability while at a desk.  With the shrinking of parts that make up computers we will be seeing a drastic reduction in size and weight of these ulta portable notebooks.  Not only will they be smaller but they will be potent and even come equipped with quad-core Intel i7 processors and decent graphics.  On the other hand you will also see that there is a move to the opposite extreme as there will be new 18″ gaming notebooks that will be the true embodiment of the “desktop replacement” name.  Some of these huge notebooks will even sport gaming grade mechanical keyboards featuring Cherry MX Brown switches.

Be sure to check back throughout next week as CES 2015 kicks off in Las Vegas.

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AMD (NYSE:AMD) and Samsung (KRX:005930) announced a partnership today at the AMD Future of Compute event in held in Singapore.

The partnership will have Samsung making FreeSync enabled displays, and they will begin to appear in March of next year.  The first will be 23.6 inch and 28 inch versions of the UD590 which will both be UHD (4K) displays.  Later will come some more UHD displays in the UE850 line with 23.6 inch, 28 inch , and 31.5 inch models.  AMD’s FreeSync is its alternative to Nvidia’s G-SYNC tech that has been in the market for over a year now. AMD went the royalty free route with its FreeSync technology that is based on the Adaptive-Sync open standard for DisplayPort.  VESA is implementing this technology in the new DisplayPort 1.2a and DisplayPort 1.3 specification.  With the lower costs of FreeSync tech this will no doubt encourage more manufacturers to use it in upcoming models.

It may be fairly late in the game for FreeSync since G-Sync has done well with gaming enthusiasts looking to get a good gaming monitor.  Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has made headway getting companies on the G-SYNC train, such as ASUS (TPE: 2357), BenQ (TPE:8215), Philips, and Acer (TPE:2353).  The 27″ QHD (2560×1440) 144Hz ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q is by far one of the best G-SYNC monitors that is currently available but sells for $799 and isn’t even 4K.  There are also UHD versions available such as the Acer XB280HK that retails for just under $800. But even with a decent amount of monitors on the market, Nvidia’s G-Sync monitors command a serious premium over equally specced monitors without G-Sync. As such, this could potentially put Nvidia at a disadvantage since many monitor manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to differentiate without spending too much money on the bill of materials (BOM).

There is little doubt that FreeSync will do well and that the partnership between AMD and Samsung will do well with the products.  With about four months until the models come out users will have plenty of time to set some money aside each month now that we have a date.  This will be the go-to monitor of choice for the AMD fans and there sure are plenty of them waiting for the next-gen AMD product to pair with a FreeSync monitor. There has also been talk of companies like BENQ and even ASUS potentially releasing FreeSync compatible monitors. The reality of the situation is that adaptive sync is the superior technology and will very likely get adopted by Intel and that will help AMD overcome Nvidia’s overall size and dominance in the graphics market. Once AMD can partner with Intel (crazy to think) to push FreeSync/Adaptive Sync in both companies’ products then G-Sync will effectively be dead. But you can’t blame Nvidia for wanting to improve gaming, even at a fairly high cost.

The partnership will see Samsung releasing new FreeSync monitors in March 2015.

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This year at Computex 2014, AMD had a lot to show consumers including their new Kaveri mobile chip, FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop running Battlefield 4 in 4K. Those three things were without a doubt AMD’s biggest announcements this week at Computex and we’ve got you covered with all the information about them, including videos and photos to simplify the explanation. We’ll be following up this article with another talking about Kaveri mobile, so most of the focus here will be on FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop playing Battlefield 4.

At the beginning of Computex, AMD had a press conference where they talked about FreeSync and Kaveri mobile, and they had a demo of FreeSync running on one PC with the feature turned on and off. What they didn’t tell us was that at their booth on the Nangang convention center, they actually had FreeSync running side by side. So, when we found out about it we ran down to Nangang and got a video of the whole thing running side by side. Thanks to our Sony a6000 camera, we were able to easily capture the difference side by side and you can see the stuttering for yourself in the video.

Please remember that FreeSync is AMD’s similar implementation of what Nvidia did with G-Sync by combining the Adaptive Sync capabilities of eDP (embedded DisplayPort) in monitors. And by getting VESA to allow for it to translate over DisplayPort 1.2, creating Adaptive-Sync for DisplayPort and creating a DisplayPort 1.2a standard that would enable the translation of Adaptive-Sync from GPU to monitor. This full solution is dubbed by AMD as FreeSync since it should theoretically not cost consumers any more money as most features of FreeSync can be accomplished via firmware update. However, not many monitors use eDP so many consumers would end up having to get new monitors in order to be able to use FreeSync.

During AMD’s press conference they also had a Toshiba 4K laptop (the first 4K laptop in the world) running Battlefield 4. This laptop looked very unassuming in terms of physical attributes, but the 4K screen on the Toshiba laptop looked absolutely amazing. Sure, the frame rate was fairly low, but that means you could probably expect to play less intensive games in 4K on this Toshiba 4K laptop without a problem in the world.

We even included a video of this Toshiba 4K laptop so that you could see it for yourself since we had originally talked about it from its original announcement, but very few have had actually gotten their hands on it. The laptop itself runs very smoothly and is a great piece of kit, it will be interesting to see how much having a 4K panel affects battery life and how much more power the GPU consumes constantly displaying at 4K.

We’ll have more Computex coverage for you as we get to uploading more of our videos from the show.

The post Videos: AMD FreeSync and 4K Laptop at Computex 2014 appeared first on VR World.

As we had already reported, a component of the AMD technology coined as FreeSync has finally been ratified and standardized by VESA as part of the DisplayPort 1.2a standard. As of today, however, the standard will be known as Adaptive-Sync. While it may not be as catchy for companies like AMD, which liked to brag about the fact that their version of adaptive refresh rate syncing was a ‘free’ upgrade the truth is the technology is best named Adaptive-Sync. This is a more open version of what Nvidia’s currently doing with their G-Sync technology, which is also an adaptive-sync technology, but requires Nvidia GPU and Nvidia monitor electronics both of which are not only cost prohibitive but fairly closed in terms of accessibility to others. As such, Nvidia must be applauded for having brought this technology to market and for having made the issue a topic of discussion and ultimately resulting in DisplayPort’s supporting of this new adaptive-sync technology.

How Adaptive-Sync works in different scenarios

Adaptive-Sync is a great technology because it will allow both gaming desktop and notebook manufacturers to not only smooth out the frame rates of gaming and graphics, but also to only refresh the monitor as many times as the GPU is capable of delivering frames. This means that with fewer refreshes we could see much better power consumption and battery life out of these displays, which ultimately results in better power bills for people that always have their monitors on and better battery life for mobile devices that connect to an external display. Adaptive-Sync has been a part of VESA’s embedded DisplayPort, eDP, spec since 2009 and as a result, a lot of adaptive-sync technology is already incorporated into a lot of the components for displays that rely on eDP for internal signaling.

Implementation of DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync technology is offered to VESA members free without any license fee, which means we will likely see big monitor manufacturers like Dell and Samsung adopting this standard fairly quickly. This announcement, as we had stated earlier would likely happen in May, and precede VESA’s DisplayPort 1.3 announcement. This announcement is expected to come around the late Q2, early Q3 timeframe and will include all of the DisplayPort 1.2a features including adaptive-sync. And thanks to the inclusion of adaptive-sync into DisplayPort 1.2, the DisplayPort 1.3 standard may have an easier time enabling things like 8K video since supporting 8K video at variable lower frame rates going to be less bandwidth intensive than 30 or 60p. While we don’t know what the exact final specifications of DisplayPort 1.3 will be, we do know it will likely include VESA’s new video compression standard called Display Stream Compression which is designed to support up to 8K video. As we’ve said before, the people at VESA would really like to be able to maintain the same cabling as DisplayPort 1.1 and 1.2, however it may not be possible in order to enable 8K and 4K 3D technologies. Until then, we’ll keep you updated and informed on the latest from VESA and all of the video standards.

Update 11:35 am: AMD has sent us a series of Q&A about the new DisplayPort Adaptive-sync technology addressing some people’s questions

Q:What is DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync?
A: DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync is a new addition to the DisplayPort™ 1.2a specification, ported from the embedded DisplayPort™ v1.0 specification. DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync provides an industry-standard mechanism that enables real-time adjustment of a monitor’s refresh rate of a display over a DisplayPort™ link.

Q: What is Project FreeSync?
A: Project FreeSync is an AMD effort to leverage industry standards, like DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync, to deliver dynamic refresh rates. Dynamic refresh rates synchronize the refresh rate of a compatible monitor to the framerate of a user’s AMD Radeon™ graphics to reduce or eliminate stuttering, juddering and/or tearing during gaming and video playback.

Q: How are DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync and Project FreeSync different?
A: DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync is an ingredient DisplayPort™ feature that enables real-time adjustment of monitor refresh rates required by technologies like Project FreeSync. Project FreeSync is a unique AMD hardware/software solution that utilizes DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync protocols to enable user-facing benefits: smooth, tearing-free and low-latency gameplay and video.

Q: Is DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync the industry-standard version of Project FreeSync?
A: The DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync specification was ported from the Embedded DisplayPort™ specification through a proposal to the VESA group by AMD. DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync is an ingredient feature of a DisplayPort™ link and an industry standard that enables technologies like Project FreeSync.

Q: What are the requirements to use FreeSync?
A: To take advantage of the benefits of Project FreeSync, users will require: a monitor compatible with DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync, a compatible AMD Radeon™ GPU with a DisplayPort™ connection, and a compatible AMD Catalyst™ graphics driver. AMD plans to release a compatible graphics driver to coincide with the introduction of the first DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync monitors.

Q: When can I buy a monitor compatible with Project FreeSync?
A: AMD has undertaken every necessary effort to enable Project FreeSync in the display ecosystem. Monitor vendors are now integrating the DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync specification and productizing compatible displays. AMD is working closely with these vendors to bring products to market, and we expect compatible monitors within 6-12 months.

Q: What AMD Radeon™ GPUs are compatible with Project FreeSync?
A: The first discrete GPUs compatible with Project FreeSync are the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and R7 260 graphics cards. Project FreeSync is also compatible with AMD APUs codenamed “Kabini,” “Temash,” “Beema,” and “Mullins.” All compatible products must be connected via DisplayPort™ to a display that supports DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync.

Q: How is Project Freesync different from NVIDIA G-Sync?
A: While both technologies have similar benefits, G-Sync uses expensive and proprietary hardware. In contrast, Project FreeSync utilizes the industry-standard DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync specification to promote wider adoption, lower cost of ownership, and a broad ecosystem of compatibility.

Q: Why should gamers purchase a system that utilizes Project FreeSync?
A: Project FreeSync’s ability to synchronize the refresh rate of a display to the framerate of a graphics card can eliminate visual artifacts that many gamers are especially sensitive to: screen tearing, input lag, and stuttering. Project FreeSync aims to accomplish this through an open ecosystem that does not require licensing fees from participants, which encourages broad adoption and low end-user costs.

Q: What is the supported range of refresh rates with FreeSync and DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync?
A: AMD Radeon™ graphics cards will support a wide variety of dynamic refresh ranges with Project FreeSync. Using DisplayPort™ Adaptive-Sync, the graphics card can detect and set an appropriate maximum and minimum refresh rate based on the capabilities reported by the display. Potential ranges include 36-240Hz, 21-144Hz, 17-120Hz and 9-60Hz.

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