As content creators begin moving toward ever higher resolutions and bitrates for their content, the capabilities of current display connectivity standards like HDMI and DisplayPort are being pushed to their limits. Many displays with resolutions higher than 4K require multiple cable connections to achieve acceptable refresh rates, for example, because a single cable (HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.4) does not offer enough bandwidth.
VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, however, just announced the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, which triples the peak bandwidth and incorporates some new features as well, designed to improve efficiency.
“DP 2.0 offers differentiated end-to-end user experiences, across a multitude of market segments, such as productivity and gaming, as well as wider end-to-end interoperability with various connectivity options. It sets a new paradigm for display interface specifications by providing scalability from power-efficient small form-factor displays, to high-resolution and high-refresh-rate large form-factor displays,” said Syed Athar Hussain, VESA Board Vice Chairman and Display Domain Senior Fellow, AMD.
Evolution Of DisplayPort Bandwidth.
The majority of current-generation devices that feature DisplayPort connections that conform to the 1.3 or 1.4 standard. DisplayPort 1.4 offers a maximum payload bandwidth of 25.92Gbps and a maximum link bandwidth of 32.4Gbps — that equates to about an 80% link efficiency. DisplayPort 2.0, however, will offer a max payload bandwidth of 77.37Gbps and max total link bandwidth of 80Gbps, which equates to a link efficiency of 97% — DP 2.0 will be able to better use the total available bandwidth with less overhead. That increase in bandwidth and link efficiency will allow DisplayPort 2.0 enabled devices to support a maximum single display resolution of a whopping 16K (15360×8460) with a 60Hz refresh rate (with support for 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR). Multiple 10K and 8K display options at refresh rates up to 144Hz will also be supported (the announcement has a full breakdown of resolution and panel options).
DP 2.0 will also support a new feature called Panel Replay, which is designed to optimize power usage and thermals in devices like as all-in-one PCs and laptops that also have high-resolution displays. Panel Replay is to PSR, or Panel Self Refresh, which has been available with Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) for quite some time, but Panel Replay incorporates a partial screen update feature that allows the system’s GPU to update only the portion of a display that has changed since the previous frame was delivered. Updating smaller portions of the display will ultimately save power, but the GPU itself must also have support for Panel Replay built in.
The first products that will incorporate DisplayPort 2.0 are slated to arrive at some point late next year.
