Intel: VESA Adaptive-Sync support is a priority

Intel, through Vice President Lisa Pearce, has announced that VESA Adaptive-Sync support is a priority. It is still unclear when this support will be available and with which GPUs.

Lisa Pearce says on Twitter that it is a priority of Intel to support the standard interfaces already on the market today. She says that it is not so much important for Intel to come up with a ‘proprietary solution’, but above all to appeal to the largest possible user group.

From that point of view, Pearce also says that implementing Adaptive-Sync support for integrated GPUs has a higher priority than support for discrete GPUs. The company will come with a separate graphics high-end chip in 2020, so it seems obvious that the support for Adaptive-Sync will follow sometime in 2019.

At the end of August, Chris Hook also said that Adaptive-Sync is in the pipeline, although the former AMD marketing chief did not provide further details. That this support is coming has been clear since Intel confirmed it in 2015. It is unknown why support is taking so long.

Adaptive-Sync is based on AMD’s FreeSync standard, which controls a variable refresh rate for monitors to prevent tearing and stuttering. VESA has included FreeSync under the name Adaptive-Sync in the displayport 1.2a standard.

If Intel will support the technology with a range of integrated GPUs, that would be a significant boost for the standard. Nvidia, AMD’s competitor in the field of separate video cards, uses its own technology in the form of G-Sync. Unlike FreeSync, G-Sync is not an open standard and requires a hardware implementation.