Initially demonstrated at CES in January 2014, AMD has been working on hard on making their FreeSync technology a reality for at least the past 14 months. A reaction to the public release of Nvidia's G-SYNC the previous month, the implementation was obviously in its infancy ? the demonstration was performed on a laptop where the engineers had far greater control over the scalar component of the LCD panel. Nevertheless it showed great promise.

AMD then went down the route less taken ? attempting to make the standard an open one which could be adopted by monitor manufacturers without expensive licencing arrangements or additional costs to the end-user. Their argument was simple ? the VESA V-Blank specification, which defines the refresh rate of a given panel, was too limited to allow true synchronisation but that an implementation would be possible which didn't place onerous requirements on monitor manufacturers. VESA eventually found that their argument had some merit, despite representations against it by their competitors, christening the new standard Adaptive Sync.

As part of DisplayPort 1.2a Adaptive Sync is a purely optional standard which monitor manufacturers can apply to their DisplayPort 1.2-enabled monitors, free of liscensing. AMD's graphics hardware can then make use of FreeSync technology to essentially tell the monitor when to grab a new frame from the frame buffer, rather than rely on continuous polling from new and more complicated scaler hardware.