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New DisplayPort 1.4 Standard Can Drive 8K Monitors Over A USB Type-C Cable (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the 7,680-x-4,320 dept.

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.

11 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. "visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Call it what it is. Don't break terminology for marketing.

    1. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by rh2600 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed... 'visually' lossless for images is a bit like saying 320kbps MP3s are 'audibly' lossless for music... Something is either lossless or not, it's a binary...

    2. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the medical field this is not meaningless. If a radiologist missed the cancer, and the lawyers find that he was using a "lossy" display there's a real possibility of a lawsuit. This is why diagnostic imaging is almost universally stored in a lossless format. The three main choices being uncompressed, JPEG process-14, or JPEG2000 Lossless.

      --
      Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
    3. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by amRadioHed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Is the human eye capable of detecting the difference you gave in your example? That sounds unlikely.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    4. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Fortunately or unfortunately, that's not the point. There have been demonstrations to that affect but no one is willing to risk it.

      --
      Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
    5. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by chuckugly · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Very true, however if you have to choose between 30fps and shallow color (which is brutally throwing away a fixed amount of data) or an algorithm that can much more intelligently decide which parts of a 60fps HDR stream matter least, the 'lossy' version is very likely to look better and exhibit better fidelity with a 60fps HDR uncompressed original, even if nothing is 'lost' in the standard color 30fps version after the downconversion.

    6. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by lgw · · Score: 5, Funny

      Something is either lossless or not, it's a binary

      Assuming that everything is black or white is a poor start to a discussion about visual fidelity.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    7. Re:"visually lossless" sounds a lot like lossy... by Art3x · · Score: 5, Informative

      I thought the same thing until I read an article by David Newman, an engineer for Cineform. He personally defined visually lossless as "when the compression error falls well below the inherent noise floor of the imaging device" (Visually Lossless and how to back it up).

      He says, more or less, that if you set a camera on a tripod and shoot a still life of, say, a bowl of fruit, there still will be a difference from one frame to the next in the video, even in a totally uncompressed signal. This can mainly be blamed on noise in the image sensor. All sensors have a noise floor. So first you measure what that noise is. Then you measure how much degradation a certain compression introduces. If the difference between the uncompressed and compressed signal is less than or equal to the difference between uncompressed frames, then you might call the codec visually lossless.

      Actually he takes it one step further. He averaged 72 frames of the stationary object to mostly remove the noise even from the image sensor. He then saw whether the compressed image differed from this "golden frame" by more than any given uncompressed frame differed from it.

      Yes, yes, yes, there's no telling what standard VESA used, but at this point I think visually lossless can have some meaning. Usually, in fact, video that's called visually lossless is very, very good and can only be discerned at much closer-than-average viewing distances and often with various image enhancements to bring out the noise. In normal viewing conditions, most video professionals, and certainly even more consumers, cannot tell the diffference between the original and any of the codecs that tout themselves (scientifically or otherwise) as visually lossless.

  2. The future looks bright! by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    ---

    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.

    1. Re:The future looks bright! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      According to the specs for that 32" monitor you linked the PPI (pixels per inch) is 3840/29.1 = 131. The correct text scale setting for your 4K monitor is only 125% (the ideal value for your 4K monitor is 131/96 = 136%). Your Dell 30" 2560x1600 monitor should be running at 100% text scale (aka. 96 PPI), at least that was what I used on my old one.

      Going from 100% to 125% is nowhere near enough to remove the "jaggies" in the Windows text rendering. The most likely reason you like the text better on your 4K monitor is better (newer) IPS display technology in your 4K monitor.

      The ideal monitor size for a 4K monitor for office work is 24" as that puts the scale at exactly 200%. The ideal monitor size to replace your old 30" is a 5K monitor at 27" as also puts the scale exactly at 200%.

      Why 200%? Because that's the magical scale that makes it a "retina" monitor where the OS can upscale old applications linear fashion without aliasing articles like bluring.

      As for HDR improvements, as long as Microsoft's Display Window Manager (DWM) only supports 24 bpp you will never see the HDR feature unless you launch a fullscreen game..

  3. Re:Looks like all the connectors are going away by Parafilmus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hmm... so you're saying my keyboard's gonna have an AT connector attached to a PS/2 adapter attached to a USB adapter attached to a Type C adapter? Sounds good to me. Bring it on!