AMD Fires Back at G-Sync With Non-Proprietary Alternative
AMD counters Nvidia's G-Sync with its own free FreeSync technology at CES 2014.
Not long ago, Nvidia announced its all-new G-Sync technology, which made quite an impact. Since that happened though, a lot of the enthusiast crowd has been awaiting AMD's response but has not received one. Now though, everything changes as AMD is demonstrating its supposed FreeSync technology, which requires no proprietary hardware – just a panel with VESA's variable VBLANK support and a GPU (or APU) with support for the technology.
To demonstrate the technology, AMD purchased two Toshiba Satellite Click notebooks, which have the appropriate hardware support. The reason for this, according to AMD, is that there has been increasing pressure from various parties to bring variable VBLANK support to mobile devices for power saving reasons.
Support for the variable VBLANK technology from a driver-side standpoint was all that was required; it is already featured in AMD's latest Catalyst graphics driver. However, none of the actual controls have been brought to the user configuration screen yet.
VBLANK is effectively keeping the same image-screen without refreshing it. Variable VBLANK would be equivalent to a variable refresh rate, effectively achieving the same purpose as Nvidia's G-Sync. According to The Tech Report, AMD's executives were puzzled as to why Nvidia chose to implement a solution that requires expensive external hardware. The explanation given is that Nvidia's GPUs might not have support for variable VBLANK built in, thus needing external hardware. It's not certain though, since only GTX650 Ti BOOST cards or higher support G-Sync, indicating that there is some sort of hardware within the GPU that is required.
It seems that AMD isn't yet at a stage to publicly release FreeSync, but that will change as time goes by and more and more display panels incorporate VESA's standard for variable VBLANK technology. The technology is still in an early stage and requires more development before it can be fully deployed, so stay tuned for more!

This seems rather Logical and obvious, as in, if you want a good V-Sync, the aded input lag is not from you waiting for the entire image/frame to load, but for the system to notice that and decide to display the image.
This might seem like little to most people, but Ive been an avid amateur Starcraft Broodwar player for a long time, and even thou i can bearly tell that my laptop monitor displays faster an image than my TV (and bare in mind this is when i have them next to each other and actually try to notice if there is a difference), When i play the game at many actions per second, the TV feels terribly slow.
I know that in Single player games this does not happen often, but in fast paced games (for example in car racing) this can clearly be a deal breaker.
Id rather AMD and nVidia work on better AA systems, cosidering that SweetFX is basicly better than any technology out there right now, and its produced by some dude (and I asumme not only him), while AMD and nVidia have a decent amount of tech profesionals that could improve it even further.
I do like AMD more for making the technology free compared to nVidia, but in the end, performnace to price is my golden rule, unless a technology is actually worth the extra dollars/euros.
While the time it takes to display the frame is the same, the timing of when the frame starts is variable. Current monitors are synchronous. This means if your GPU does not have a new frame ready, it doesn't need to wait until the next frame starts, it just doesn't push a new frame and waits until the next is done. This only affects the monitor when the FPS drops below the refresh rate.
-Proud AMD Owner of FX 8350 AND 7870
Well it'd be nice to hear something from AMD that wasn't a childish "lol ours is better trust us!" first.
While Nvidia is crap with stuff like this locking it down to certain platforms, no doubt AMD's implementation will be just as bad.
For instance, can anyone at all here name a monitor that supports VBLANK?