AMD Freesync Hands-on with BenQ, Samsung & LG Monitors - CES 2015
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,336 words · ~6 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of CES 2015 is brought to you by Phantom glass visit
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store. phantom.in screen protectors out there
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as well as hyperx so here it is guys AMD free sync a year late and a dollar short
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although that's not necessarily A Bad Thing it did take a year compared to
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NVIDIA's g-sync and it's a lot more than a dollar short the main benefit that AMD
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is touting for free sync is that first four letters the whole free thing so as
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long as you have an AMD GPU and as long as the monitor has a scaler with a
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firmware that supports free sync there is no additional cost compared to any
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other high-end monitor that has a decent scaler in it that also has a variable
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refresh rate panel so compared to g-sync which actually has an over $100 module
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cost that goes along with the monitor freesync doesn't cost extra and it
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actually comes with a couple of other benefits that they're talking about as well while freesync variable refresh
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rate technology is not supported on on HDMI or DVI or any of those more
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traditional inputs the monitor can at least support them without free sync you
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will need to run DisplayPort for free sync to function now if this sounds very
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sort of you know too good to be true actually it gets even better so unlike
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g-sync AMD is launching they're going to have sometime in the next quarter or so
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12 monitors already with freesync and I kind of went well how did you get so
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many when g-sync is still struggling to get a ton of support and the answer is
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well because it doesn't actually cost the monitor vendors anything extra and
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gives them an additional value ad and you might go okay well what's the value
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ad what exactly is this free sync from AMD g-sync from NVIDIA thing and the
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answer is it's variable refresh rate technology so when your GPU is
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outputting at exactly 144 frames per
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second so this is a 27 in 144 HZ monitor
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if your GPU could output at exactly 144 frames per second exactly evenly and
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smoothly all the time then you would never experience what's called tearing
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if the frame rate goes too high or too low you can experience a phenomenon
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called tearing where it's actually showing part of the you know the last
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frame that was rendered up here and part of the next frame down here and they can
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be kind of separated from each other and particularly when moving fast this can
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be very visually distracting especially in certain games so free sync totally
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eliminates that by allowing the monitor to refresh every time the GPU outputs a
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frame to it now it's not perfect and something that you might even be able to
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see right now is that depending on the implementation from the monitor vendors
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you will see either freey disable at
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somewhere in the range of maybe 40 HZ or somewhere in the range of maybe you know
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30 htz where it'll actually if the game frame rate drops below that range freyn
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will actually disable and you will see a little bit of tearing but this is not an
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inherent limitation of freey this is a limitation of the panel technology once
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you start to refresh them extremely slowly you're going to get flickering
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rather than tearing and that can can be even less desirable especially if you
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dip below that quite frequently it'll be very distracting to your eyes so
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freesync actually supports refresh rates as low as 9 Hertz but we're not going to
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see anything like that today so you kind of go okay there's 12 monitors or
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something like that they're promising up to 20 by the end of the year but what
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kind of monitors are we getting are we getting a bunch of 1080 ptn panels no
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actually AMD has a cross-section of different monitors right here in their
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Booth so this is the BenQ XL 2730 Z I'm
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going to try and get all these model names right this is a 27in 2560
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x600 TN panel and it runs at 144 Herz so
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I was getting the look is he going to miss the refresh rate that's really
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important because this is going to this looks like it's going to be a great competitor for something like the ASUS R
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OG Swift this one right here is the
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Samsung uee 590 I sure hope that's right
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yeah it is 28 in 4k 60 HZ and this one
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is not a TN panel this is actually a VA type panel they've actually got their
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demo running here where you can much like we've already seen with NVIDIA's
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pendulum demo you can switch between oh I don't know 45 FPS and 60 FPS and you
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can do sweeping FPS it can change all the time and you can actually see very
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visually if I turn free sync off whoa
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that's ugly and this is not a faked demo you've probably seen this especially
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games like Skyrim man that game Tears
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like a this one right over here is
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the LG this is the
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2967 yeah nailed it so that's a 2560 by
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1080 IPS monitor we've actually reviewed
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it's little nonf freesync enabled brother I'm personally a huge fan of the
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whole ultrawide thing but not a big fan of 10 10,080 vertical pixels but don't
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worry LG is actually showing off hopefully we're going to be checking that out tomorrow in their Booth the 34
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in 3440 x440 version of this monitor
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that is also 60 HZ also free sync enabled so it is an extremely exciting
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time for at least the folks at AMD who want people buying AMD graphics cards
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and having that uh that variable refresh rate feature that is the kind of thing
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that's hard to sell to people because unless they've seen it before it's hard
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to understand why you would even care about something that you've been putting up with for the last 5 10 or 20 years or
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however long you've been a gamer putting up with tearing so I think that pretty
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much wraps it up that is the definitely the most exciting thing here at the AMD
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Booth guys don't miss any of our CES coverage click that subscribe button so
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in the video description thanks for watching guys and we'll see you at our next CES 2015 video