For gamers who are looking to get the best out of their gaming rigs, they’ve probably scouted around for monitors with the fastest response times, and in the case of NVIDIA GPU owners, probably looked for monitors that supports NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology. So where does this leave AMD gamers? While to some gamers this might not be a big deal, there are some who strongly believe that this matters, and if you’re an AMD gamer you’re in luck because Samsung has recently announced two new monitors that will support AMD’s FreeSync which is the company’s answer to NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology.
Today at AMD’s Future of Compute event in Singapore, AMD announced partnerships with several companies. One of the more noteworthy announcements is that Samsung will be making FreeSync enabled displays that should be available in March 2015. The displays consist of the 23.6″ and 28″ UD590, and there will be 23.6″, 28″, and 31.5″ variants of the UE850. These are all UHD (4K) displays, and Samsung has stated their intention to support Adaptive-Sync (and thereby FreeSync) on all of their UHD displays in the future. FreeSync is AMD’s alternative to NVIDIA’s G-SYNC, with a few key differences. The biggest difference is that AMD proposed an extension to DisplayPort called Adaptive-Sync, and the VESA group accepted this extension as an amendment to the DisplayPort 1.2a specifications. Adaptive-Sync is thus an open standard that FreeSync leverages to enable variable refresh rates. As far as system requirements for FreeSync, other than a display that supports DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync, you need a supported AMD GPU with a DisplayPort connection and a driver from AMD with FreeSync support.