Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2015 is brought to you by phantom glass visit store dot phantom dot glass for the best iron screen protectors out there as well as HyperX so here it is guys AMD freesync a year late and a dollar short and well though that's not necessarily a bad thing it did take a year compared to in videos do you think and it's a lot more than a dollar short the main benefit that AMD is touting for free sync is that first four letters the whole free thing so as long as you have an AMD GPU and as long as the monitor has a scaler with a firmware that supports free sync there is no additional cost compared to any other high-end monitor that has a decent scaler in it that also has a variable refresh rate panel so compared to gsync which actually has an over $100 module cost that goes along with the monitor freesync doesn't cost extra it actually comes with a couple of other benefits that they're talking about as well while free sync variable refresh rate technology is not supported on HDMI or DVI or any of those more traditional inputs the monitor can at least support them without free sync you will need to run DisplayPort for free sync to function now if this sounds very sort of you know too good to be true actually it gets even better so unlike g-sync AMD is launching they're going to have sometime in the next quarter or so 12 monitors already with free sync and I kind of went well how did you get so many wengie sync is still struggling to get a ton of support and the answer is well because it doesn't actually cost the monitor vendors anything extra and gives them an additional value add and you might go cable what's the value add what exactly is this free sync from AMD G sync from Nvidia thing and the answer is it's variable refresh rate technology so when your GPU is outputting add exactly 144 frames per second so this is a 27-inch 144 Hertz monitor if your GPU could output at exactly 144 frames per second exactly evenly and smoothly all the time then you would never experience what's called tearing if the frame rate goes too high or too low you can experience a phenomenon called tearing where it's actually showing part of the you know the last frame that was rendered up here and part of the next frame down here and they can be kind of separated from each other and particularly when fast this can be very visually distracting especially in certain games so freesync totally eliminates that by allowing the monitor to refresh every time the GPU outputs a frame to it now it's not perfect and something that you might even be able to see right now is that depending on the implementation from the monitor vendors you will see either free sync disabled at somewhere in the range of maybe 40 Hertz or somewhere in the range of maybe you know 30 Hertz where it actually if the game framerate drops below that range free sync will actually disabled you will see a little bit of tearing but this is not an inherent limitation of free sync this is a limitation of the panel technology once you start to refresh them extremely slowly you're going to get flickering rather than tearing and that can be even less desirable especially if you dip below that quite frequently it'll be very distracting to your eyes so free sync actually supports refresh rates as low as nine Hertz but we're not going to see anything like that today so you kind of go okay there's 12 monitors or something like that they're promising up to 20 by the end of the year but what kind of monitors are we getting are we getting a bunch of 1080p TN panels no actually AMD has a cross-section of different monitors right here in their booth so this is the BenQ XL 27 30 Z I'm try and get all these model names right this is a 27-inch 2560 by 1600 TN panel and it runs at 144 Hertz I was getting the look is he going to miss the refresh rate that's really important because this is going to this looks like it's going to be a great competitor for something like the Asaro G Swift this one right here is the samsung u e5 9d I sure hope that's right yeah it is 28 inch 4k 60 Hertz and this one is not a TN panel this is actually a V a type panel they've actually got their demo running here where you can much like we've already seen within videos pendulum demo you can switch between no I don't know 45 fps and 60 fps and you can do sweeping fps it can change all the time you can actually see very visually if I turn freesync off whoa that's ugly and this is not a faked demo you've probably seen this especially games like Skyrim man that game tears like a bitch this one right over here here is the LG this is the 29 um 67 yeah nailed it so that's a 2560 by 1080 IPS monitor we've actually reviewed its little non free sync enabled brother I'm personally a huge fan of the whole ultra wide thing but not a big fan of ten ten thousand eighty vertical pixels but don't worry LG is actually showing off hopefully we're going to be checking that out tomorrow in their booth the 34 inch 34 40 by 1440 version of this monitor that is also 60 Hertz also free sync enabled so it is an extremely exciting time for at least the folks at AMD who want people buying AMD graphics cards and having that that variable refresh rate feature that is the kind of thing that's hard to sell to people because unless they've seen it before it's hard to understand why you would even care about something that you've been putting up with for the last five 10 or 20 years or however long you've been a gamer putting up with tearing so I think that pretty much wraps it up that is definitely the most exciting thing here at the AMD booth guys don't miss any of our CES coverage click that subscribe button so you don't miss any of it and I do want to take a moment to thank our sponsors phantom glass these guys make the best iron screen protectors on the market they're super clear they feel just like the glass that's on your phone and there's no great secret to that it's because it's actually made of Gorilla Glass they've got a nano coating on the bottom that allows it to be applied with absolutely no bubbles effortlessly and makes it reusable so if you've got to RMA your phone you can actually take it off wrap it onto something get your phone back reapply it and you are ready to rock as well as oh yeah do you want to check out store dot phantom dog class we've got that linked in the video description you want to check that out they've got covers for lots of different phones as well as HyperX they're also sponsoring our trip to the show here you're going to wanna check out youtube.com slash HyperX for all the great gaming content that they've got going on that's also linked in the video description thanks for watching guys and we'll see you at our next CES 2015 video