Heh, I recall when Freesync was announced, many called it vaporware, a distraction, a marketing stunt with no products.
It's the same as when Mantle was announced.
Since when is announcing an upcoming feature an act so deserving of hate and bile?
- FreeSync slowly emerging as an adaptive refresh tech that aims to become industry standard,
- Mantle proving that reduction in draw calls causes a significant increase in performance in CPU limited scenarios,
- High end GPUs from one vendor rumoured to be going WC for superior cooling and noise levels.
All of this tech is being pushed by AMD and in all of the threads related to any of these topics, the same people who own products from another popular PC vendor always have negative things to talk about or purposely downplay these new advancements.
You connect the dots.
Personally, I will support open standards if the option is there. That means we still have the power to buy FreeSync monitors and force NV to support it over time. Then I don't have to worry what GPU vendor's card to buy in the next 7-10 years I own that monitor (my current monitor is already 7.5 ears old). However, if we start buying G-Sync monitors, we are not going to get NV to change their stance. The end result is that we will be vendor locked with either AMD and FreeSync or NV and G-Sync for the entire duration of our LCD monitor's lifetime.
This idea that I am promoting vendor lock over an open standard is so against my values, that I will not buy a G-Sync monitor because I don't want tech to be in the way of my buying choices and I will send that message by voting with my wallet. If NV changes its stance and offers support for both GSync and FreeSync if they think GSync is superior, I have no issue with that.
Since FreeSync/GSync benefit the most at < 60 fps, and since 4K IPS monitors are still not DP1.3 + HDMI 2.0 capable at a reasonable price, it doesn't matter that FreeSync will launch in 1st or 2nd half of 2015. What matters is that in the next 3-5 years there will be a major push into 4K PC gaming and AMD's FreeSync must work well in time for when the 4K IPS/VA adoption skyrockets. Until the inevitable 4K revolution takes place, saying that AMD is late misses the point of where we are in the 4K adoption product cycle.
The fact that GSync beat it to market is good for NV but for most consumers it changed little since so few GSync monitors are out and only 1-2 of them (Swift) is actually any good. For new tech to become mainstream, we need 100s of monitors to support it. Thus far GSync beat FreeSync to launch but it has failed to gain any mainstream traction. My feeling is the general market opposes being locked into a GPU upgrade path, most now are waiting to jump to 4K, and most know that 99% of 1080/1440P TN GSync monitors are not very good as monitors to begin with.