At AMD they want us to play in 8K and HDR: their future graphics paint a future with DisplayPort 2.0 connections

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The HDMI 2.1 standard is undoubtedly great for gamers: its adoption by manufacturers of televisions, monitors (still incipient) and especially consoles and graphics manufacturers has made both NVIDIA and AMD already offer these types of connections on their latest GPUs.

However, it seems that AMD is not satisfied with that, and there is already talk of how your future graphics cards will feature DisplayPort 2.0 ports. What does that mean? Well, play more and better thanks to the bandwidth support that will allow you to enjoy games in 8K (and up to 16K!).

Long live the bandwidth

We have been talking about the new version of the DisplayPort standard for some time, but its practical implementation and its arrival in products for end users it’s taking a while to arrive.

Now it seems that in 2022 we could start to see those products, and one of those that could drive the adoption of this standard is AMD. Your future graphics based on RDNA 3 microarchitecture point to DisplayPort 2.0 support.

How do we know? Thanks to the latest patches that have been integrated into the Open Source drivers for AMD graphics cards for Linux (AMDGPU). According to those patches, developed by AMD itself, that standard will be supported.

The DisplayPort 2.0 standard specification was announced more than two years ago, and some time later it was added the Alt Mode specification that allowed the USB-C connectors to be adopted with USB4 interface.

That means that all DP 2.0 options will be accessible with a USB-C connector. Among them, one particularly stands out: bandwidth, which can be up to 77.37 Gbps using four channels. That is fantastic, especially when we compare it with the not inconsiderable 48 Gbps already achieved in HDMI 2.1.

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With that bandwidth it is possible enjoy 8K resolutions at 60Hz with HDR supportAnd that’s not counting the potential compression: if we use the so-called Display Stream Compression (DSC) it is possible to support 16K resolutions at 60 Hz.

The pandemic has once again been responsible for delays in the arrival of products to the market, and it seems that monitors with this support will arrive first, perhaps in the second half of 2021. What it does seem is that future AMD graphics will also arrive prepared to support DP 2.0, and it would be difficult for its great rival, NVIDIA, not to offer that capacity as well.