Intel reserved $ 3 billion in 2019 to competitively block AMD

I think people thinking that Nvidia stole it are merely referring to monitors being labled as "Gsync ready" and not "Adaptive Sync capable" or something similar.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not seeing them stealing anything either, and those names and qualities put onto monitor descriptions on sales platforms and PR material... if so, that's the manufacturing companies doing it. And last time I checked, there's a bigger market (more Geforce cards in PCs) for "Gsync compatible" than "AMD Freesync". So it's a business decision... no conspiracy theory needed to explain this.

 

I don't want to derail the thread so I won't dive too deep into this but the complaint re: stealing FreeSync goes a bit deeper than that.

Any monitor that's certified "G-Sync Compatible", which tend to be some of the higher-end FreeSync ones, are effectively no longer FreeSync monitors.

They're not advertised as supporting FreeSync anywhere, not on the manufacturers pages and not in online stores etc.

I'm not relying on only the reporting on the subject on this either, as I've walked into this trap myself. Primarily when looking through a local online price aggregator and filtering for "FreeSync" and "FreeSync 2" displays. Turns out that excluded "G-Sync Compatible" monitors, despite those being actual FreeSync monitors! I don't know if/when I would have noticed that on my own if it weren't for the reporting on this.

The "stealing" allegation is entirely fitting IMO, as Nvidia has essentially hijacked all the best FreeSync displays.

Someone needs to start asking questions as to why none of these displays are marketed as supporting FreeSync, in addition to being G-Sync compatible. I find it hard to believe that all the manufacturers would drop a potential sticker/badge/keyword which gives them more sales potential on their own accord, and doing it in an incredibly consistent manner at that. That just reeks of something else.

TL; DR: It's not about Nvidia supporting FreeSync, or even getting paid for "G-Sync Compatible" stickers. It's about anything with that sticker suddenly no longer supporting FreeSync.

 

Playing the fanboy card, typical of a fanboy.
Maybe stealing wasnt the best word. Gsync brand has replaced freesync. Maybe adaptive sync pops up on a few products, but Gsync is the winner.
You have to be naive to think that this have anything to do with "standard", it has to do with customers and brand awareness. Or what ever to call it..
And i dont see what so shocking about that fact. Nvidia has done worse thing than this. Btw, im not defending amd, it seems amd likes to bend over at times.. But it dosent mean i need to support nvidia doing this, or one of the other crap they done. And to really mess with your mind, this dosent mean nvidia dosent make fine products, i have had 2 nvidia for generations now.
They just shown several times, they cant be trusted. And they dont mind misusing their marked dominates to undermine their competition. Result, we consumers ends up as the losers. At least for the most part.
So it has nothing to do with what team your on, it has everything to do with what the end result might be for us consumers. So snap out of it, being fanboy or apathetic consumers just shows that its ok to lie or bend\break the rules in the name of profit..

 

VESA Adaptive Sync is technology that AMD created! They developed it, promoted it and pushed to make it a standard and yet Nvidia is making it appear as if its associated with their proprietary G-Sync technology. There was a recent Reddit thread where someone assumed precisely this (they thought they needed an Nvidia GPU to use a G-Sync compatible monitor). The fact is, G-Sync compatible has nothing to do with G-Sync (which requires a proprietary chip in the monitor to work) but they used the brand name to give the false illusion that it did. They didn't just "adopt an industry standard", they hijacked it as if it was their own tech.

 

The big difference here is marketing talk vs. actual product qualities.

I personally look at this from a technical side. There Nvidia did not steal anything... marketing wise, they did, yes. Through clever marketing and other companies playing along, they did. So if you say Nvidia stole them, let's widen this out to the monitor manufacturing companies, since ultimately they print their boxes, and price aggregators as well, since they design their own interfaces and filters.

As an "educated" buyer I can hardly be bothered about stickers, labels, and marketing talk. It's my duty and advantage to check product qualities and capabilities before I buy them. But there's a lot of people who, like you described it, would not be able to guess that such monitors were Freesync2 monitors e.g. But... what happened to people making their own decisions? About buyers reading small print to see what the hardware really is able to do?

Meaning, should I feel that one company is to take all the blame for people no longer caring to read up on their hundreds of dollar purchases? I'm not sure that's the thing here. Morals aside, I find that too little credit is given to the customer in terms of his purchase decisions and their own responsibility in that field.

 

Please go watch the Linus video of Gsync and the extreme testing they do in house to certify any panel to claim Gsync. Nvidia cards can enable freesync/adaptive sync on any panel now but the ones that are labels Gsync have been extensively tested. This is not fanboyism its fact. AMD just lests any panel enable freesync to the point where some are utter trash and others are great. That translates into uneven user experiences across multiple monitors. Where as a full Gsync monitor is going to just work, period.

You can hate on Nvidia and I don't blame you but the most consistent and enjoyable adaptive sync experience is currently the Nvidia platform.

This is a case of someone simply not doing their own research. I'm sorry but I'm over catering to the dumb masses. There is nothing shady at all going on here. Nvidia is not "hiding" or "hijacking" anything. The differences between the tiers of the Gsync cerification are easily found on Nvidia's website along with a FAQ. What a fool does with his money is none of my nor your concern. This presenting opinion as fact crap must just come with the AMD fanboy territory.

 

Dude, Nvidia spent years building up the public perception of G-Sync as their proprietary technology that only works with their GPUs. Why would anyone go to Nvidia's site to find out what they already know? It's not like this is some brand new tech that nobody knows about - Nvidia was banking on their existing brand recognition to make people think they needed Nvidia GPUs for these monitors... and it worked!

 

True Gsync certified monitors with the module do require an Nvidia GPU for the adaptive sync to work. And the worst thing anyone can do in the technology area is assume. Again I’m not bending over backwards for lazy consumers and neither should AMD or Nvidia.

 

negative, nvidia made sure they were the best and gave them a test backed label to prove it.

Something AMD never even bothered to try and do.

no they didn't, no they didn't and... no they didn't.

AMD took an already existing VESA optional spec (used in edp for notebooks from 2009 on), made a marketting slogan out of it, then didn't qualify user experience via testing leading to a large amount of CRAPPY, GHOSTY, BLURRY, FLICKERY piles of garbage that belong on a rocket into the sun.

 

To be fair AMD had reasons for doing this. It adds cost to the panel for the manufacturers to have them certified. It delays the release of the panel. And lastly AMD did not have the extra capital to set up a testing devision like Nvidia did. AMD wanted free sync panels in the wild and widely available for a lower cost ASAP.

 

Yeah, so I'll be taking this further OT. Apologies.

I get what you're saying but I can't for the life of me imagine a situation where the monitor manufacturers, with incredibly consistent results, decided it was a good idea to drop the FreeSync branding from their G-Sync Compatible displays. If there's a reason other than "because Nvidia demanded it as part of their 'G-sync Compatible' sticker program" I'm not seeing it. I'd happily be informed otherwise though, assuming there are facts about the situation out there.

Funnily enough the best analogue would be exactly the comparisons already made in this thread, about Intel using its financial clout to demand big OEMs not buying AMD product. This is Nvidia demanding third party products not being marketed towards their competition.

Sure, fundamentally it requires the monitor manufacturers to decide that the 'G-Sync Compatible' sticker is worth more than the certification cost and lost sales from removing the FreeSync compatibility but that doesn't mean they're any more at fault than Dell was for Intel demanding them not to sell AMD product.

I'm obviously not saying you're not entitled to a different opinion based on different criteria, just that personally I don't feel the physical standard compatibility, legal definition of theft or what-have-you matters much. Nvidia have effectively stolen most of the 'good' FreeSync monitors for themselves.

That being said... arguably the most important thing, IMO, is recognizing that when we're talking about Nvidia stealing FreeSync it's not about them supporting FreeSync displays in their drivers - that's an universal good from a consumer standpoint - but rather the mysterious disappearance of FreeSync branding.

And it doesn't seem to me that we disagree about that.

That's never really been a reasonable ask, which is why we have consumer protections in the first place.

Beyond that though I'd consider myself a well-informed buyer and the reason I even discovered this is due to the reporting!

I'm not trawling though hundreds, let alone thousands, of monitors when I'm trying to narrow down a group of interesting options. I'll filter on display resolution, update frequency, size etc. and yes, that includes FreeSync or G-Sync compatibility depending on the needs of the person I'm doing the research for. We're now at a point where I can't do that any longer, for VRR solutions specifically, because the returned results aren't going to be correct.

And that's only because I'm now informed about this situation.

A less informed buyer, of which there are likely to be many, wouldn't know about this situation and in the end it's going to cost the monitor manufacturers sales (arguably a calculated decision on their part, though an unnecessary one) and end up being a competitive disadvantage for AMD.

AMD won the VRR war on merits, FreeSync offering largely the same functionality as G-Sync at a cheaper price and thus vastly outsold G-Sync displays. Nvidia is now stealing that for themselves, most certainly not on the merits.

""There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now…"

What about people with an AMD card, looking for a FreeSync display? They're effectively being cut out of access to many high-end FreeSync displays, because they didn't check the Nvidia's homepage for FAQs about what monitors they can use?

Certainly there's something to be said for making informed purchasing decisions but that assumes there's a reasonable way to be informed in the first place.

 

I don't think it's a matter of being lazy. I mean, how often do you double-check things that you know very well already? The G-Sync compatible logo typically has the Nvidia logo on it as well and consumers can feel assured that it works with an Nvidia GPU. Even if FreeSync is listed in the specs, an AMD owner can't be entirely sure it will work with their GPU when it has G-Sync as a prominent feature - and I don't blame them for not taking the chance.

Of course this issue could be avoided if FreeSync was also prominently listed, but that could be confusing for Nvidia owners, who've been trained for years to think that FreeSync only works with AMD GPUs. I guess the monitor makers didn't want to chase away potential Nvidia customers, who would be more likely to buy a premium monitor - makes sense from a business perspective.

 

What are you getting on about? Free sync is prominently advertised in all free sync capable monitors. The ones that are validated Gsync compatible aren’t even branded Gsync. Your argument is null and void. Only the ones that are certified or higher tier get branded because they have been tested in house by Nvidia and they pass all tests. Any freesync monitor can work with a GTX/RTX card but Nvidia does not want to brand one that does not meet their standards. The branded ones carry a higher price because typically they are a higher end panel and logic board to begin with and they have gone through the certification testing which cost money (that cost is passed onto the consumer).

 

No we do not disagree, nothing you said is untrue or unimaginable.

Well in my humble opinion, consumer protection's more of making sure that consumers get treated according to the law, more so then taking their hand with buyer's decisions. But that might be just my personal way of seeing it, since I too have to read into car deals if I want to buy a new one, even if it's labled to run with 95 octane fuel, most cars run on 91 or even 89 or less (it's usually given that way in the manual, and as long as there's no bio fuel inside the mix). Do I see this as a case for customer protection? No I don't.

You found out, that's true. That's exactly what I meant, tried to stress, you did research and found out... in my humblest of opinions, you just strengthen my way of seeing it since you did the right thing, read up, and found out about the truth and core of things. That's very much what I'd say everybody should do. But that's just my opinion, and as such, I can understand why you do not share this impression.

All you have to do now is search for Freesync, Freesync 2 and Gsync compatible. A click more because you were obviously smart enough to read up. Didn't cost you a leg of broke your neck... I too fell to marketing talk before as well, tought me a lesson. No, mGPU systems do not prove double the power, for instance, which was my mistake back then.

Maybe many people won't see or find out what you did. Or many others, on the other hand, already know. But there's always a lot of people buying by marketing talk, flunky stickers on the box, and overly exaggerating marketing. That doesn't mean that all this time it's a matter that is as such against the law. Shady, when I think about it, yes, but not more than many, many other companies do in other fields of products. And I don't see such outrage to that, so I find it a little... one sided to just contribute the whole blame for any situation to just one company. Blame the manufacturers of monitors and price listers as well, and we're on the same page.

As for the last part, I'm curios, do you think that not the majority of people that would search for "Gsync compatible" already have an Nvidia GPU? So this branding serves them, the customers, more than a Freesync 2 sticker. Sure this is going down the road "the ends justify the methods", and as such unethically. But this is capitalism... what would you expect? Understand the nature of the beast, and you understand what it's capable of.

Say all "Gsync compatible" monitors would be labled as AMD Freesync 2, this is the better option? I doubt sales for the companies would go up that way. Sad, but true.


So to say it again, yes it's practically grabbing that market by Nvidia and the monitor manufacturers. And along with the labling of the manufacturers the price listing sites. This is, if under any circumstances, a complaint would be filed, first and foremost to be started by AMD, and taken to the manufacturers and labling responsible people on the monitor's side. If they find out Nvidia forced them, or paid them to put their sticker on it, is this illegal? If they forced it, yes, if they did not, and those monitor companies did by themselves, is this Nvidia's issue?

And as for consumers, I can't stress it enough, read up on expensive purchases. A monitor of 200+$ price is not a thing you buy on a whim because there's a good deal on the gas station.
This is my personal opinion, and if there is a law that puts Nvidia in the position of the offender by law, AMD should act on it. They won't though because the matter isn't as simple as that.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/dda0yy/freesync_monitors_are_actively_being_advertised/

In the above thread, FreeSync monitors from large manufacturers prominently display G-Sync or G-Sync compatible (FreeSync is only mentioned briefly, if at all). This is what I'm talking about - not all FreeSync monitors prominently advertise FreeSync, and many of the ones that are certified for G-Sync compatible prioritize the G-Sync aspect over FreeSync.

 

It'd help a lot of various price aggregators and online shops made that an option, agreed

For the moment the ones I tend to use don't make a distinction between 'G-Sync' and 'G-Sync compatible', which makes this particular situation more gnarly than it have to be. I reckon it's a bit of a chicken-vs-egg problem, most of the information in these are crowd-sourced and the people adding the information might not always know themselves.

There's also some minor technical limitations I think, usually sites have something like a 'VRR' or 'Adaptive Sync' category with a space for a single entry. Ie. it's difficult to add a product that supports both G-Sync and FreeSync.

Hopefully that part of the equation gets fixed soon though.

Oh, absolutely!

That, to me, has never been the question though. It's about what happens when someone who's looking for a FreeSync display sees 'G-Sync Compatible' or even just 'G-Sync' listed for a monitor that's, technically, FreeSync.

My point is that the monitors in question should be clearly labeled with both "FreeSync"/"FreeSync 2" and "G-Sync Compatible". IMO it's the only thing that makes sense and actually helps consumers find what they're looking for.

And in that case yes, I absolutely believe prominently displaying both stickers would lead to more sales than choosing either over the other.

 

From the link you provided.

"
ROG Strix XG258Q Gaming Monitor – 25 inch (24.5 inch viewable) FHD (1920x1080), Native 240Hz, 1ms, G-SYNC Compatible, Adaptive-Sync, Asus Aura RGB"

It mentions G-sync first but again they had to pay to get the certification on this monitor so of course it will be advertized but right after that it clearly says AS and in the features the very next feature after G-sync is Freesync with all the marketing jargon associated with it. If this is your smoking gun then dude get a life. AMD fanboi's have an inferiority complex and constantly look for the smallest things to claim an unfair treatment. Which company currently has the higher number of dGPU's in the consumer market? Nvidia as a manufacturer I would cater my marketing to the more prominent consumer.


BTW if anyone wants to find a freesync display for their AMD card AMD has you covered.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/freesync-monitors

Again FUCKN RESEARCH!!!!!

 

That ad says precisely what I said - G-Sync listed prominently and prioritized over FreeSync, which is barely mentioned at all (they don't even mention AMD on the page). The Acer XFA240 monitor on Amazon.com doesn't mention FreeSync at all, yet you continue to deny that this is an issue? Seriously now, how much more proof do you need?

It's just like the GPP - Nvidia fanboys denying any and all issues and downplaying like crazy.

 

WTF The page literally has a demo of Freesync and only states the G-Sync certification. You are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

https://www.asus.com/us/Monitors/ROG-Strix-XG258Q/

AGAIN GO TO AMD's OWN WEBSITE AND PICK YOUR FREESYNC MONITOR OF CHOICE FROM THERE!!!!!!!!

Anyone that chooses not to do that deserves anything that comes their way. Or deep down do you think AMD users are just that ignorant that they would buy the wrong monitor? Because that is what it is starting to look like. every time you bring an argument in it really brings into question the intelligence of the hypothetical consumer you are representing.

 

What a company, either the manufacturer or seller, advertises, will be based off of what sells better. Since nvidia is the more dominant GPU manufacturer and therefore has more customers interested in something labeled "gsync" then customers interested in something labeled "freesync", it makes sense. Though realisticially, it should do both.

But what i will find is interesting about the acer model you pulled out is yes amazon does not talk about freesync at all, but acers own website doesn't talk about g-sync at all. So who is at fault here? Who is more wrong? Acer for not listing g-sync, when it is g-sync compatible, or amazon for not listing freesync, when it is freesync compatible?

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/CA/content/model/UM.FX0AA.004