Adaptive Sync as a whole

Rather

than give a specific display an award, this year I’m giving out our Monitor of the Year award to the Adaptive-Sync and FreeSync technologies unveiled by both AMD and VESA. We should all thank Nvidia for getting the ball rolling on this technology, with its G-Sync tech being the original method proposed to synchronise your GPU’s output to the display’s screen refresh. It’s a simple idea that has a dramatic impact on the gaming experience; by only updating the screen when there’s a fresh frame to go with it, it removes all of the issues around V-Sync, such as latency, framerate drops and stuttering. It also means that we can enjoy framerates of around 45fps and above and they still feel nice and smooth.

Sadly Nvidia’s method was proprietary, which meant it was out of bounds to AMD and cost more for monitor makers to implement. So AMD decided to work with VESA, creator of international display standards, to come up with its own method. The base technology was called Adaptive-Sync, and was made a part of the DisplayPort 1.2a standard. AMD then built on this as the foundation for its FreeSync feature, which duplicated G-Sync but without expensive proprietary hardware. The first few FreeSync displays had a few issues, such as a limited window of refresh rates where FreeSync actually worked, but by the end of the year it had rapidly approached the high quality of Nvidia’s solution. With the recent news that Intel has backed Adaptive-Sync, it now seems to just be a matter of time before Nvidia does too, and we can all look forward to framesynched displays becoming the norm.