New DisplayPort 1.4 Standard Can Drive 8K Monitors Over A USB Type-C Cable (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec, which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data -- High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane -- is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a "visually lossless" form of compression that VESA says "enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio." This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR "deep color" over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too.
Call it what it is. Don't break terminology for marketing.
Modern app appers know that ONLY apps can app apps, so appers only use AppPort App Apps, NOT LUDDITE DisplayPort!
Apps!
I have to say that I'm more excited about 4k at 120hz than 8k at 60hz, but it is all an improvement.
As it stands now, 4k displays are wonderful for work, I am typing this on my office computer which has a pair of Acer 32" 4k displays on it.
Acer 32" 4K IPS display
http://amzn.to/1poiivZ
They are beautiful monitors. Not perfect color and I wouldn't suggest them if 100% color accuracy is your goal, but for general business use, they are just about the perfect combination of size and resolution. My home machine runs a trio of Dell 30" 1600p monitors, and while they are nice for gaming, I can tell the difference between a 30" 1600p monitor and a 32" 4k monitor when it comes to text in Windows. Almost all "jaggies" are gone at 4k, the text is the closest I've ever seen a monitor to get to "paper" look. The 30" 1600p monitors still show "jaggies" in Windows text.
Now for gaming, they aren't quite there yet. Between the slower response time of IPS and the inability to get decent GPU performance, 4k is a rough experience. I tried several games and I found that while they are beautiful, the limit is the GPU power.
I did try only a single GPU (GTX 980 TI), I imagine a dual SLI GPU configuration would be better, but I didn't have a second 980 TI to try that out with. 8k will be awhile in terms of gaming, if due to lack of GPU power if anything else.
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TL;DR - 120hz should be the new standard, it will reduce eyestrain and open up options for gaming and movies that don't exist at 60hz, while the HDR improvements will also be wonderful. I'm not convinced that 8k will show up any time soon or even be needed, but time will tell on that one.
Looks like all the connectors are going away and everything is standardizing on USB Type-C connector. Good. Everything piggybacks over USB 3.1 including power. This looks like the best thing.
I realise there are few, affordable, 8K displays on the market but shouldn't a standard assume forward compatibility if it already supports 120Hz at 4K?
It sounds great, but I'm a bit worried about using USB for a video signal. For a start, the USB protocol was never designed for low latency high capacity transfers. Encoding the video into the USB protocol and back could add a bit of latency compared to a dedicated video streaming cable and protocol. Even worse, there could be traffic in the USB cable.
Having said that, if the USB controller could be set into some QoS mode where video has higher priority than anything else, then it could start to look interesting. It would likely require a custom USB controller or at least a controller with support for some feature. However none of the links are very specific about details when they mention "USB Type-C cables", which mean based on this I can't tell if latency can be an issue in some setups. Losing one frame every hour could be acceptable on TV, but likely less acceptable on a high end gaming computer. People claim bad gaming results on lag. Imagine if they start to say "the screen lagged due to high USB traffic".
Anybody want to drop a fortune on an 8K monitor only to have it ruined by a shoddy cable? Anyone? Bueller?
I'm waiting to buy DisplayPort 1.5 next week in preparation for my 16k TV set next year.. :)
"drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays..."
Is this adequate? Wouldn't you want 240Hz so that you don't get eyestrain? I don't watch TV but I've heard that somewhere.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'm guessing that most 32inch 4K display's use an LG panel but a lot of user reviews I see of the LG, Dell and Asus complain of moderate to severe backlight bleed not to mention other assorted issues i.e. could not display at 60hz via displayport using the correct certified cables; some people say displayport on these monitors is broken and even with certified cables the computer and monitors don't see each other all the time. For what people are paying for there should not be these problems.
Do they advertise that the displays will run indefinitely without needing to be power cycled, that the backlighting is perfectly uniform, and that warranty replacements would be painless? If all they said was it has a certain resolution and refresh rate, don't blame them for false advertising when it sucks in some other way.
I should have said that from my limited experience and from what others have said at least some of the displayport problems are in software.
Another is how some monitors work badly directly plugged into a machine but work perfectly if a Matrox two screen displayport splitter box is plugged into the same screen. It's looking a lot like problems in software, probably a step above the manufacturers drivers (because on linux the module supplied by nvidia does all of the work and communicates directly with X - nvidia got it right there so maybe it's somebody else's problem on MS).
Neat. Wake me up when it can do that without a cable of any kind.
Hopefully the new iMacs that come out this year will use this. And finally will be able to be used as external monitors.
This is a very small step in the right direction.
The bandwidth requirements of modern monitor cables are insane. We have up to nearly 40gbps between a PC and a 4K monitor with 60Hz.
The strange thing is: it is already been proven that 50mbps are more than enough (with compression). There are three orders of magnitude in between.
IMHO the next monitor cable should be something like CAT6A and the GPU and the monitor should speak over an IP connection. This would greatly simplify a lot of things.
so it is "visually lossy" after all. if you can tell the difference via video scopes, or any other form of visual analysis, that's probably the definition of "lossy".
I don't think any DP1.3 devices are consumer-available yet, and they're already releasing the DP1.4 spec. Not that it's their fault, but I wish we could have faster movement on the hardware side.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
What kind of input lag would add such a compression/decompression scheme?
I've seen providers talking about 'low latency' with figures of a hundred milliseconds or more, and that is for a measly 1080p video image. That would not be acceptable at all for gaming or serious applications.
Not exactly what you are getting at but the main technology that separate Displayport from previous display standards is that the video signal is in fact packetized (but it uses as they call it "micro-packets"). This is how they've been able to get up to 8k/60hz now without changing the cables or the connector. It's not quite as high level as an IP connection but more akin to PCI-Express rather then just a raw stream of bits over a wire.