AMD officially announce FreeSync 2

FreeSync started out as a simple idea, to create an industry standard for variable refresh technology. It was designed to compete with Nvidia’s G-Sync variable refresh solution, with the introduction of Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) technology in 2015 giving FreeSync feature parity with G-Sync.  

Now AMD has announced FreeSync 2, which is not a successor to FreeSync but concurrently running program which adds qualifications for display latency, colour space and adds LFC support as a non-optional requirement.   

This means that all FreeSync 2 displays will support a wide colour gamut (HDR), traditional FreeSync with LFC and be verified by AMD to have a low display latency, ensuring that Radeon users have a great gaming experience.   

The FreeSync 2 standard will effectively ensure that all products carrying AMD F2 brand name will be of a high quality, ensuring that they all will be suitable for your gaming needs. 

One of the biggest changes that FreeSync 2 offers is that every display must be able to communicate with your PC to share colour space info, brightness ranges and not just variable refresh rate information. This allows your PC to automatically send images that are best suited to your display when running HDR content, without the need to spend an excessive amount of time setting up your display/PC configuration.

One other thing that FreeSync 2 allows is for your PC to do all display tone mapping before sending an image to the display, hugely reducing the display latency of HDR monitors. When looking at modern HDR TVs it is common to have 32ms of extra display latency when running a TV in HDR mode, which is something that is unacceptable when gaming. FreeSync 2 solves this issue by allowing your PC to take care of this task, rather than the low-power SoC that powers your display.  

When compared to sRGB FreeSync 2 displays will offer at least two times the colour space and offer a brightness of at least 400 nits, which while lower than some HDR standards is a huge increase over traditional display technology. 

Remember that these are lower limits for FreeSync 2 displays, so display makers can easily push things further if they wish. As we have said earlier, every FreeSync 2 display will automatically communicate with your PC to share colour space info, brightness ranges and not just variable refresh rate information, allowing your PC to provide your display with an ideal signal to make the most out of its specifications. 

With FreeSync 2, AMD promises to deliver displays with LFC, low latency throughput and high-quality images, which means that PC gamers can expect a display revolution when the first FreeSync 2 compliant monitors launch later this year. 

All current FreeSync ready GPUs are compatible with FreeSync 2 displays, with AMD hoping for the first FreeSync 2 displays to launch in the first half of 2017. 

You can join the discussion on FreeSync 2 on the OC3D Forums.