AMD FreeSync through HDMI and HDR Support

AMD FreeSync through HDMI and HDR Support

 

With AMD’s new Radeon Software Driver AMD Implemented a lot of changes to their FreeSync technology, implementing support for their Low Framerate Compensation technology (LFC) and promising support for FreeSync over HDMI in the future.

Now AMD has revealed that they will be supporting FreeSync through HDMI in 2016, bringing adaptive refresh rates to a much wider audience and hopefully to much more affordable displays. AMD has also stated that they are also pushing for a new generation of Notebooks and convertibles with built in FreeSync technology. 

AMD’s Radeon technology group will be working with the three biggest monitor scalar manufacturers, MStar, NovaTech and Realtek, in order to implement FreeSync into a much wider range of displays.

 

   Radeon Technologies Group is bringing AMD Freesync Technology to life over the HDMI connecter in 2016 by collaborating with Acer, LG, MStar, NovaTech, Realtek,and Samsung.  

 

 

 

 Right now several monitor manufacturers are promising to release HDMI FreeSync ready monitors in 2016, and you can see a list of a few of the confirmed displays below, which include displays that support resolutions up to 3440×1440. 

 

 

 

The second big change that AMD is making to their GPUs is that they plan on implementing High Dynamic Range (HDR) support on the next generation of AMD Radeon GPUs, allowing AMD Radeon GPUs to support higher than 10-bit displays. This will allow these GPUs to support up to 32-bit colour, which has full 16.7 million colours compared to 1.07 million colours with 10-bit colour.  

This upgrade in both colour quality and contrast will enable images to look much more life like on HDR monitors, so much so that AMD claim that 1080p HDR content will look better than standard dynamic range (SDR) 4K content. 

AMD also say that they are working with game developers to get HDR content into future games. 

 

        

 

HDR content will be placing a lot more load onto display interfaces, as all the extra colour and contrast data will need to be transmitted to the display, which will mean the we will need a higher bandwidth connector for future HDR displays in order to run these displays at a high framerate. This is where DisplayPort 1.3 comes in, offering over 80% more bandwidth than HDMI 2.0 

 

  

Using this new display interface will also allow monitors to be pushed to higher refresh rates than ever before, allowing 1440p monitors to be pushed at up to 240Hz in SDR or 170Hz in HDR, or 4K at up to 120Hz in SDR. 

With the next generation of GPUs being expected to give us a massive increase in performance having displays which are capable of ever higher refresh rates will be a must for many high end gamers. Personally I am looking forward to seeing a LFC compatible FreeSync 120Hz 4K monitor. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s FreeSync over HDMI and support of HDR on next gen GPUs on the OC3D Forums.