 Linus Tech Tips coverage of CES 2015 is brought to you by Phantom Glass. Visit store.phantom.glass for the best darn screen protectors out there, as well as HyperX. So here it is guys, AMD FreeSync, a year late and a dollar short. Although that's not necessarily a bad thing. It did take a year compared to Nvidia's G-Sync and it's a lot more than a dollar short. The main benefit that AMD is touting for FreeSync 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 FreeSync, 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 G-Sync, which actually has an over $100 module cost that goes along with the monitor, FreeSync doesn't cost extra and it actually comes with a couple of other benefits that they're talking about as well. While FreeSync, 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 FreeSync. You will need to run DisplayPort for FreeSync 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 FreeSync and I kind of went, well how did you get so many? When G-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, okay, well what's the value add? What exactly is this FreeSync from AMD, G-Sync from Nvidia thing? And the answer is, it's variable refresh rate technology. So when your GPU is outputting at 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 moving 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 FreeSync disable at somewhere in the range of maybe 40 hertz or somewhere in the range of maybe, you know, 30 hertz, where it'll actually, if the game frame rate drops below that range, FreeSync will actually disable and you will see a little bit of tearing, but this is not an inherent limitation of FreeSync, this is a limitation of the panel technology. Once you start to refresh them extremely slowly, you're gonna 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 FreeSync actually supports refresh rates as low as 9 hertz, but we're not gonna 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 XL2730Z, I'm gonna try and get all these model names right, this is a 27 inch, 2560 by 1600 TN panel and it runs at 144 hertz, so I was getting the look. Is he gonna miss the refresh rate? That's really important, because this looks like it's gonna be a great competitor for something like the ASUS ROG Swift. This one right here is the Samsung UE590, 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 VA type panel. They've actually got their demo running here where you can, much like we've already seen with Nvidia's Pendulum demo, you can switch between, I don't know, 45 FPS and 60 FPS and you can do sweeping FPS, it can change all the time and 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 is the LG... This is the 29UM67, yeah, nailed it. So that's a 2560 by 1080 IPS monitor, we've actually reviewed its little non-FreeSync enabled brother. I'm personally a huge fan of the whole ultra-wide thing, but not a big fan of 10,000 80 vertical pixels, but don't worry, LG is actually showing off, hopefully we're gonna be checking that out tomorrow in their booth, the 34 inch, 3440 by 1440 version of this monitor that is also 60 hertz, also FreeSync 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 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 5, 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. 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Thanks for watching guys and we'll see you at our next CES 2015 video.