VESA of the week release DisplayPort specification version 2.1. This update brought some significant efficiency changes, but as you can see, VESA worked hard to keep things smooth for both implementers and consumers.
DisplayPort 2.1 is not only backward compatible with DisplayPort 2.0. Through the efforts of VESA and its partners, “All previously qualified DisplayPort 2.0 products are already qualified to the more stringent DisplayPort 2.1 specification.” Yes, yes GPUs, docking stations qualified for DisplayPort 2.0 , monitors, cables (or anything else) fall under the new, more stringent v2.1 specification.
According to VESA, one of the most important things we tried to achieve with this update is to provide a robust experience. This philosophy applies to users connecting peripherals via native his DisplayPort cable, DisplayPort Alt Mode (her DisplayPort over USB Type-C connector), or tunneling over a USB4 link. No matter which solution you use, the specifications and her PHY (physical layer) have been strengthened to improve reliability.
So if all these things stay the same and DisplayPort 2.0 and 2.1 are interchangeable, you might be wondering what’s the point of the new specification. Perhaps the most important introduction is a new DisplayPort bandwidth management feature that “allows DisplayPort tunneling to coexist more efficiently with other I/O data traffic over USB4 links.” According to a VESA press release, this efficiency is built on newly mandated support for VESA’s Visual Lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC) codec and VESA’s Panel Replay feature. VESA’s DSC implementation reduces bandwidth usage by as much as 67% with no visual artifacts. In addition, the new Panel Replay feature can reduce tunneling packet transfer bandwidth by over 99% in certain situations.
VESA Board Chair and VESA DisplayPort Task Group Chair Alan Kobayashi boldly asserts that the higher bitrates supported by DisplayPort 2.1 “provide sufficient bandwidth for the needs of nearly all practical applications.” claimed to
The announcement also revealed updated specs for the cable. VESA aims to use DisplayPort 2.1 to allow for increased functionality and longer cable lengths, sometimes exceeding 2 meters. “The VESA-certified DP40 cable supports up to UHBR10 link rates (10 Gbps) and provides throughput of up to 40 Gbps over four lanes,” he explains VESA. “The VESA certified DP80 cable supports up to UHBR20 link rates (20 Gbps) and provides a maximum throughput of 80 Gbps with 4 lanes.”
Interestingly, former HardOCP Editor-in-Chief Kyle Bennett murmured Multiple sources had indicated to him last week that AMD Radeon Navi 31 GPUs would offer support for the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. Intel Arc LE model GPUs also support DisplayPort 2.0. Considering the VESA announcement, both AMD and Intel GPUs will support his DisplayPort 2.1. Putting these things into a competitive perspective, his recently launched Nvidia Ada Lovelace flagship GeForce RTX 4090 supports DisplayPort 1.4.
