AMD Radeon FreeSync 2 HDR Launch Slides Leaked

With CES just down the week, everyone one is waiting for those major announcements that are sure to come then. In a surprise twist, AMD is reportedly doing a major software reveal today ahead of CES. In just a few hours, AMD is set to announce their new Radeon FreeSync 2 technology. Luckily for us, the launch slides have been leaked just ahead of the official reveal and they provide some key clues.

If the slides are correct, it looks like FreeSync 2 is sort of related but not really to the original FreeSync. Judging from the slides, FreeSync 2 appears to be a new software technology aimed at making High Dynamic Ranger easier and better to implement. AMD has always been talking about HDR as something they’ve been working on and it looks like FreeSync 2 will take it to the next level and try to bring it mainstream.

First up, it looks like FreeSync 2 will replace the usual HDR transport with FreeSync Transport rendering stack. This appears to allow the Display Tone Mapping to be skipped, cutting down on latency and input lag. The transport stream also appears to be more compressed and more likely than not losslessly as well. The goal seems to be to make HDR as little work as possible relative to normal output. Doubtless AMD will be providing more details on that but I suspect FreeSync Transport combines the transport with the display tone mapping functions in one.

The second part is the Automatic Mode Switch that FreeSync 2 will provide. Depending on the detected content, the sRGB or HDR will be chosen to be displayed, likely an efficiency objective. This will likely require both GPU, software and monitor support to function properly. I guess if you look at it from an power savings/efficiency and input lag improvement, FreeSync 2 kind of is like FreeSync. It will be interesting to see how much support current FreeSync displays already have and what things will need to change.