Hello, I've been reading about the similarities between variable refresh rate technologies, and I was wondering if the old AMD proprietary FreeSync over HDMI could be presented as VRR. I've seen some monitors (including mine) and lots of TVs supporting HDMI FreeSync (my MSI calls it "Console Mode", due to it being supported by the XBox Series models).
I don't recall seeing any HDMI 1.x screen with VRR support, I suspect there are close to no controllers available, while there are plenty legacy FreeSync or HDMI 2.x.
It is also interesting that I'm on a NVidia Turing card, which is unique in supporting VRR over HDMI 1.x, so there shouldn't be risk of dumping unsupported bandwidths or something (?). Simply adding a HDMI 2.x block to 'CTA-861' with 'Variable refresh rate' filled up didn't work, the monitor shown no image. I don't expect this to work, otherwise it'be promoted everywhere.. But I would appreciate a more technical answer.
Side note:
My new monitor actually has a DisplayPort socket, but I've discovered the QoL to be so poor on windows.. Extremely aggressive VESA hot-plug detection (not configurable in my case) and malfunctioning DDC/CI (probably an issue of the Windows stack, on Linux works fine).
When my old panel broke I was really looking forward to try out VRR tech, but as a student I use my pc for 90% work and the displayport user experience is really hurting my workflow.
Can a HDMI FreeSync monitor understand HDMI VRR?
Re: Can a HDMI FreeSync monitor understand HDMI VRR?
Sadly, I do not think that VRR from your Turing card could be used for Freesync over HDMI. The Freesync over HDMI spec was created using a HDMI protocol extension with AMD's own implementation. The data packet that is sent over the HDMI wire is probably in a different format than the VRR data packet that is sent by your card. Even if you got your card sending the VRR data packets over HDMI, the monitor would not be able to understand them. You would either need to change the firmware of the monitor to parse these packets, have an adapter or cable that would convert the VRR data into a Freesync compatible format, or hack the Nvidia drivers to send Freesync formatted data packets. All of these solutions seem very impossible to do and probably not worth the effort.
There is something you could do that might work. If you get an AMD card (even the cheapest and weakest card should be fine) or have an AMD cpu with integrated graphics, if you plug the monitor into the AMD card you should be able to get the Freesync working. Then you could render the game or content with the Nvidia card and push the output over the AMD card, in some sort of optimus-like configuration. This will incur some latency and performance cost, but probably will work. In Windows 11 or 10, you can configure which GPU should be used for high performance (Under System > Display > Graphics)
There is something you could do that might work. If you get an AMD card (even the cheapest and weakest card should be fine) or have an AMD cpu with integrated graphics, if you plug the monitor into the AMD card you should be able to get the Freesync working. Then you could render the game or content with the Nvidia card and push the output over the AMD card, in some sort of optimus-like configuration. This will incur some latency and performance cost, but probably will work. In Windows 11 or 10, you can configure which GPU should be used for high performance (Under System > Display > Graphics)