It leaked just a day before hand, but AMD probably didn’t mind all too much. The announce of FreeSync 2 was spoiled with the press release making its way to the public early on, but the none the less, the official announcement is here.
FreeSync 2 is set to arrive the first half of 2017 and will bring support for low-latency, excellent black levels, high brightness pixels, and HDR. The big advantage will be the added support for HDR through drivers instead of the having Windows handle it. AMD are also including automatic mode switching, that allows for the color space/HDR to activate when loading a game, over the default sRGB.
FreeSync 2 aims and removing the displays need for handling tone mapping itself, which isn’t a problem for movies and videos, but adds serious lag for gaming. AMD’s new API for FreeSync will shift the needed workload to the graphics card, which will do so with much lower latency.
The new standard will of course require new monitors and AMD are pushing for FreeSync 2 certified monitors to include Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) with a 2.5times max refresh rate over minimum refresh rate. This is an effort to make sure any FreeSync monitor advertised doesn’t come with a simply 30-60hz range or worse.
AMD will be previewing their new Vega GPU Architecture this week, which is rumoured to offer some serious performance gains, and clearly AMD are pushing FreeSync 2 with the launch of their new GPU as well.
