AMD has released the new 15.3 Beta driver, showing decent performance gains, support for their long awaited Freesync technology and even details about asynchronous shaders in DirectX 12! The new driver supports monitors such as Acer’s 1440p FreeSync Predator monitor which has us all drooling. As long as you have a supported GPU, like the R9 285, you can now use this technology with the Freesync enabled monitors.
So far, the implementation of Freesync have not been all that impressive, only supporting 48 Hz to 75 Hz (48 to 75 FPS) on many monitors. This means that Freesync will only work when your frame-rate is between 45 and 75 Frames per Second on these monitors. This is still impressive though, as variable refresh rate is hard to make a possibility on modern displays.
Also in AMD news, AMD has shown off asynchronous shaders – a new way to use Multi-GPU rendering in video games and other graphically intensive applications. This new approach to rendering works by alternating the load placed on graphics cards when rendering between all of the GPU’s in a system- essentially splitting the workload over all of the GPU’s you have.
This means that for each GPU you add, the amount of work each GPU will have to do will be effectively halved, while high-end multi-GPU setups are not cheap this approach should prove to be much more energy efficient in the long run. One of the most exciting features of this new way of rendering is that Crossfire setups now will be able to use ALL of the RAM on GPUs- if you have two 2GB cards, there will actually be 4GB in use, and so on.
The improvements of Asynchronous Rendering, as well as Freesync being fully released, could lead to great performance increases and better graphics from AMD hardware in the near future – Nvidia watch out!.
This could lead to inexpensive Freesync Monitors, that have better adaptations of their open-source technology, as well as Crossfire setups no longer having much of a drawback. Perhaps cards like the R9 270 in crossfire will now make a lot more sense, as mid range cards in Crossfire could very well beat much higher-end GPUs, without any of the previous drawbacks of Crossfire only time will tell.
