The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has published the specifications for the new DisplayPort 1.4 standard. This new standard now supports 8K video at 60Hz and dual 4K video output. The current DisplayPort 1.3, which was announced in September 2014, can technically already support 8K video. Although the bandwidth provided is only capable of displaying at 30Hz.
Interestingly, the physical interface has not changed between the two standards. While DP 1.4 adopts the new USB Type-C connector, it still retains the High Bit Rate 3 interface from DP 1.3. The improved performance comes from the Display Stream Compression, which VESA is saying provides a compression ratio of 3:1.
VESA has also chosen to highlight some other key features in the announcement:
- Forward Error Correction – FEC, which overlays the DSC 1.2 transport, addresses the transport error resiliency needed for compressed video transport to external displays.
- HDR meta transport – HDR meta transport uses the “secondary data packet” transport inherent in the DisplayPort standard to provide support for the current CTA 861.3 standard, which is useful for DP to HDMI 2.0a protocol conversion, among other examples. It also offers a flexible metadata packet transport to support future dynamic HDR standards.
- Expanded audio transport – This spec extension covers capabilities such as 32 audio channels, 1536kHz sample rate, and inclusion of all known audio formats.
This is not exactly the first DisplayPort that supports the Type-C connector. DP has always technically been available to USB ports thanks to the USB Alternate Mode specification; which technically means that the current wave of USB Type-C ports can support devices meant to run on DP.
[Source: VESA, via Ars Technica]
