If you’ve gone shopping for a computer monitor in the past few years, you’ve almost certainly come across models that advertise FreeSync. This popular display technology is advertised especially heavily on gaming monitors, where the best hardware specifications mean the most advantage in gameplay. However, to the uninitiated, FreeSync is a meaningless term that can easily be confused with similar technologies like G-Sync and V-Sync. So, what exactly is FreeSync, and how useful is it?
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FreeSync was developed by AMD and first launched in 2015. It aims to solve a common communication problem between graphics cards and PCs. You see — when a graphics card sends video frames to a monitor at a different rate than the monitor’s settings, it can cause issues. The main problem is screen tearing, which is what happens when a GPU sends more frames to a monitor than it can handle, resulting in pieces of multiple frames being displayed onscreen at the same time.
This can make it look as though the image is wobbling side to side like an unstable Jenga tower. While other technologies have attempted to solve this issue over the years, FreeSync is among the best ways to do so. So, let’s dive into how FreeSync works, who should use it, and how to get the best results.
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