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Following the recent reorganization of AMD's (Advanced Micro Devices) GPU assets under the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), AMD is talking about its 2016 GPU plans.
2016 Radeon GPUs will support DisplayPort 1.3 & HDMI 2.0a. DisplayPort 1.3 will allow for 5K and even 8K resolution over a single cable, as well as 4K at the higher refresh rates (75+ Hz) needed for AMD's FreeSync Low Framerate Compensation to work. FreeSync will also work over HDMI (which is cheaper and more commonly used than DisplayPort):
Implemented over a customized version of HDMI 1.4a and utilizing a prototype Realtek timing controller, AMD was able to demonstrate variable refresh rate technology running over HDMI. At the time of the presentation AMD was very clear that the purpose of the presentation was to shop around the concept and to influence the various members of the HDMI consortium, but they were also clear that bringing variable refresh rate tech to HDMI was something the company wanted to bring to retail sooner than later. Sooner, as it turns out, was the operative word there. As part of their presentation last week, RTG has announced that FreeSync over HDMI will be heading to retail, and that it will be doing so very soon: Q1'16. This is just a year after the first DisplayPort adaptive sync monitors hit retail, which for a display technology is a rather speedy turnaround from proof of concept to retail product.
The first FreeSync-capable laptop, the Lenovo Y700, was announced by the RTG, however it only supports a small range from 40 Hz to 60 Hz.
[More after the break.]
AMD is also promoting its support for high dynamic range (HDR). HDR monitors will have increased contrast ratios, able to display using increased luminance for bright spots while displaying darker blacks:
Getting there is going to take a lot of effort. Content needs to be mastered, distributed and displayed differently than what we're accustomed to. This time next year, we'll hopefully see LCD-based screens able to hit 2000 nits of luminance—a big improvement over the 471 cd/m2 attained by the brightest UHD monitor we've reviewed thus far. But even that's a far cry from the BT.2020 color space.
Still, Kim Meinerth, senior fellow and system architect, assured us that AMD put significant effort into building a display pipeline that supports the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers' 10-bit ST 2084 electro-optical transfer function, which is much better at mimicking human vision than today's BT.1886 curve.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:37PM
As of this writing, the acronym "GCN" is not listed in the original posting of the article, nor in conversation. It is only in your quote and link.
What is GCN?
(It's the "Graphics Core Next" generation of hardware... starting with the previous generation that included the R9-2xx series).
I have two cards in R9 2xx generation and I had no idea what GCN was and had to look it up -- it never once came into my sphere of awareness when shopping for cards. It's a marketing term that I guess I just had as a blind spot; every game system since the Sega Genesis was marketed as "next gen" so if I were to take this at face value, they only recently dropped support for z-80 processors...
Anyway, if people intend to introduce an acronym not already part of the discussion -- can we at least be informed as to what it is if it doesn't directly relate to the topic at hand? Perhaps I am guilty of ignorance, but I still don't know what the OP's card was or even if GCN is related to it, as informative as it was. Nearly all of my cards lost support a while back; previous to the R9s I have, I had a 4850x2-- and that is still in use in an LGA771 conversion I did, and it still plays modern games pretty well despite not having a new driver in years.
(since I just said LGA771 without a description... that's the socket type for Intel core 2 servers, like Xeons, that can be used on an LGA775 motherboard with some physical modifications.)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:34PM
I won't blame you for not knowing what GCN is, but I was merely adding the relevant information to the discussion, and the links were included so you can follow up if you need to know more.
I think the driver issue is a little precious. Once the (old) card works, it won't need too many driver updates.
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