Last week, AMD hosted its first RTG (Radeon Technology Group) tech conference in Sonoma, California since restructuring the company to give discrete graphics more independence. The company laid out its plans for graphics technology in 2016, including new FreeSync options and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) monitors.
Current monitors and displays are only capable of reproducing a fraction of the luminance the human eye can perceive. The chart below shows the luminance values of common light sources, from sunlight at 1.6 billion nits down to ultra-black, at 0.01 nits. According to AMD, the average PC LCD only supports 0-250 nits, while a high-end LCD TV might stretch to 350-400 nits, at most.
That's going to start changing in the next 12 months, thanks to new HDR support from high-end 4K televisions and cutting-edge OLED technology. HDR LCD's can theoretically hit 1K today with 2K on the market by the end of next year, while OLEDs can push 500 nits today and up to 1K in 12 months.
Improving display quality isn't just about increasing luminance; HDR support requires a new color standard as well. The diagram below shows a number of color space standards used in various applications and fields. The outer horseshoe is known as the chromaticity diagram -- those are all the colors that a human with normal color vision can perceive. The innermost triangle with the purple dot at the top is the SRGB color space that both Blu-ray and Windows use by default. (Whether or not your LCD actually displays this space correctly is an entirely different topic).
If you work in professional editing or design and have a high-end monitor and 10-bit-capable display, you probably work in AdobeRGB (shown in green), while the Digital Cinema P3 standard is shown in yellow. The latest standard to arrive on the scene with UHD Blu-ray is known as Rec2020. Rec2020 covers 75.8% of the human chromaticity diagram, compared to the 35.9% that SRGB covers. The P3 standard is smaller, at just 53.6%, but still represents a substantial upgrade over SRGB.
SDR on the left, HDR on the right
Not every Rec2020 display is going to qualify as an HDR display, but there should be some overlap between the two capabilities on both consumer monitors and upcoming 4K HDTVs. Longtime PC gamers may remember HDR as a DX9 feature that debuted in Half Life 2's Lost Cost demo, but there's a critical difference between that implementation and the upcoming capability. Back then, internally rendered HDR was mapped back to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) for output to a conventional display. The effect, while still striking, wasn't identical to what an HDR display would offer.
AMD expects to see HDR displays in-market by the second half of next year, and it's released the following chart to document which of its current GPUs will support these capabilities:
The current crop of R9 300 cards will be capable of supporting 10-bit color channels and HDR all the way up to 4K @ 30 FPS. Keep in mind that current 4K displays are typically 8-bit panels -- this chart is a chart of future compatibility with upcoming high-end displays. If you want 60Hz refresh rates and 4K with 10-bits per channel, you'll need a next-generation Radeon card with support for HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.3 -- there's just too much data on the wire to rely on either HDMI 1.4b or DP 1.2.
Both HDR and Rec2020 support are already edging into the market on high-end televisions, so it's a safe bet that these technologies will waterfall into more mainstream hardware at some point. Exactly when that'll happen, however, is still unknown.FreeSync in 2016
Late last month, AMD retired its existing Catalyst Control Center and debuted a new software product, dubbed Radeon Crimson. One of the new capabilities introduced with the Crimson Control Center was a FreeSync updated that added low framerate compensation (LFC) support. In order to work properly, the panel needs at least a 2.5x gap between the lowest and highest refresh rates (this shouldn't be a problem for most FreeSync panels on the market).
The impact of low framerate compensation (LFC)
The practical impact of LFC is less overall motion judder and a better image. G-Sync shipped with this capability initially, so AMD is playing a bit of catch-up here, but there's no monitor firmware update or other feature that you need to flip -- the new capability will kick in automatically.
Up until now, if you've wanted Adaptive Sync (that's the generic term for G-Sync / FreeSync) in a mobile device, Nvidia has been the only game in town. That's changing, at least a little -- Lenovo is offering an exclusive version of its IdeaPad Y700 at Best Buys in the United States(Opens in a new window) (the same system is also listed on Lenovo's UK website). The $899 rig is built around AMD's FX-8800P, with an R9 M380 GPU. That's significantly cheaper than the Core i7 version with a GTX 960M, which retails for $1149.(Opens in a new window)
The other major FreeSync announcement concerns HDMI support. Up until now, both G-Sync and FreeSync have been limited to DisplayPort 1.2 monitors. DisplayPort has become more popular in recent years, but HDMI still commands the lion's share of the market.
The HDMI 1.4b standard doesn't officially support variable refresh rates, so AMD wrote their own vendor-specific extension to add the capability.
Supporting FreeSync over HDMI gives monitor vendors more flexibility to hit various price points and lets AMD support a wider range of devices. The Radeon Technologies Group is promising that their implementation will be fully compatible with future Radeon cards and conforms completely to the HDMI core standard. You can still use this display with an Intel or Nvidia GPU, in other words, and you'll be able to use it as a FreeSync display with future AMD Radeon cards not yet on the market.
Nvidia previewed G-Sync running over HDMI back at Computex, but hasn't announced a ship date for the new technology. Nvidia's G-Sync FAQ still indicates that end-users will need to use DisplayPort to enable the feature.
We'll have more to say about what AMD's RTG plans for 2016 as CES draws closer, so watch this space for details. The improved display technology and improved FreeSync support are both positives in their own right, but they're also just the beginning.
