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thepseudomancer
Journeyman III

[Suggestion] On nVidia's LightBoost Technology

I was notified by your customer service staff that this was the best way to get in touch with AMD's Marketing and Engineering departments. I have what I feel are some worthwhile suggestions to improve existing products.

Let me preface this by saying that I have been a huge fan of AMD and ATI from the day I built my first PC (a K5 with a 3D Rage Pro).

Recently there has been a growing movement among enthusiasts and gamers to adopt nVidia GPUs solely to take advantage of LightBoost, a licensed strobing backlight technology. While normally used in conjunction with nVidia's active shutter 3D system, a hack can enable LightBoost without 3D enabled. Utilizing this strobing backlight with high refresh rates produces fluid motion on par with CRT monitors.

More information can be found here:

http://www.blurbusters.com/zero-motion-blur/lightboost/

BlurBusters.com is a site dedicated to reducing motion blur on LCDs and is maintained by Mark Rejhon. He has spent quite a bit of time evangelizing LightBoost to enthusiasts in various tech communities. I have to say that he has been quite persuasive and has even convinced me, an AMD fanboy, to switch to nVidia for my next graphics card just to take advantage of this technology. Of course, I don't want to do that. Luckily there is one working solution for AMD cards to have LightBoost enabled, but it requires a very ugly method involving hot-swapping a monitor from an nVidia card to an AMD card.

But this also makes it very clear that the monitor handles things without needing a persistent connection to the nVidia GPU. In fact, it seems the GPU simply sends a command to the monitor to turn LightBoost on or off. Some have speculated that this might be a simple DDC command.

And this is why I am eager to contact AMDs fine engineering staff. I think it would be quite beneficial to everyone if AMD added a simple option to enable LightBoost on monitors that support it. While this may aid nVidia in some respect due to monitor sales, you would at least eliminate one major advantage to owning an nVidia GPU.

If making your graphics cards compatible with an nVidia technology doesn't interest you, perhaps creating a competing technology would. It seems nVidia still hasn't caught wind of this trend because they have yet to offer an easy solution to enable LightBoost without 3D. You could be the first to market a solution geared towards fluid motion by utilizing the same strobing backlight technology. Plenty of enthusiasts and gamers would prefer having less motion blur on a high-response TN display compared to the higher color accuracy of an IPS. I am sure there is a market for it.

Anyway, I hope this was a bit helpful. I'd really appreciate feedback if this gets read.

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