Saturday 6 February 2016

"Free Synch" in displays

Refresh rate is one of the most important specification of monitors. Monitors often refresh their buffers at a standard rate. This for the displays is constant at 60Hz. But these days displays are coming up with different refresh rates which is going up to 120Hz. Also, that the refresh rate can be varied dynamically based on activities on the display. These days the graphics processors are becoming performance intensive with extreme stress on display technologies. the display should sync w.r.t graphics capability of processor else you may see monitor breaking down in extreme cases (like for example take the case of high end gaming). To eliminate this sync issues, AMD came with a new technology called free sync where the refresh rate of display can be varied as per the performance requirement. Let us assume a case where there is no activity on the display, in such a case refresh rate can be reduced to lowest, thus, helping in lower power consumption. Screen-tear is one of the problems seen in high end gaming where the screen is overlapped or occupied by the previous screen. Free sync is enabled on display port with capability of performing in extremely performance intensive applications. Most of the PC games demand change in frame rates and free sync helps to compensate as per demand. The older v-sync process can't be used here as the frame expectation is different from graphical processor and display technology.
        Free sync from AMD is similar to the G-sync from Nvidia. There is a compability issue here. To take advantage of G-sync both the display and GPU should have that technology. This doesn't mean that a G-sync can't be used with normal processors. R9 series from AMD is one example which has the Free sync technology. 

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