14 DAY TRIAL // In a highly controversial move, Intel decided to take part in AMD's plan of FreeSync support on most monitor manufacturers, guaranteeing its involvement between AMD's display standard and Intel's growing GPU development.
Usually, Intel never got involved in the fight for graphical supremacy between AMD and NVIDIA, and although the two American companies did compete for the central processing unit markets, they never crossed that border against each other on other domains.
Although AMD lost the CPU battle long ago, retaining its x86 standard and settled on selling APUs, Intel's GPU business is just at entry-levels, offering nothing but the minimal gaming performance to business and consumer laptops. However, this minimal gaming performance is the new consumer laptop standard among mobile computing users, overtaking in sales all the low-entry graphical solutions from AMD and NVIDIA.
AMD's FreeSync is based on VESA's Adaptive-Sync technology which AMD has pledged to import on its own graphics cards rebranding it as FreeSync and pays license fees to VESA. Intel went in and declared its support for Adaptive-Sync, and thus, indirectly supports AMD's FreeSync since NVIDIA uses a proprietary technology called G-Sync. Both technologies are almost identical and they do exactly the same thing on their own graphics cards. However, AMD had a major advantage in securing its FreeSync brand to be present on lots of monitor brands, leaving NVIDIA with only a handful of manufacturers to contend with.
Intel comes to AMD's rescue with NVIDIA dominating the GPU market
Intel now comes along and changed things dramatically. Although it won't change NVIDIA's dominance on high-end GPU's, it will change things in entry-level systems, especially laptops where Intel's integrated graphics are dominating the mobile computing market. Since FreeSync works well on lower framerates, it will fit Intel's low performance integrated graphics solutions like a glove, artificially improving their performance via refresh rates synchronized with the GPU.
It's interesting how NVIDIA will react to this "treason," but it's likely that its high-end GPUs shares won't be affected at all by this move, especially when the Chinese market is turning en-masse to better quality, more expensive IT products. According to TechReport, Intel does not yet have a timetable on which GPUs will work with Adaptive-Sync, but it will probably be post Skylake.