Great news for you monitor enthusiasts! For users who are interested in high irresolution, faster refresh rates as well as superior color depth and much more the new DisplayPort standard has your covered. The VESA today formally announced the new 1.3 standard which brings a huge amount of specification improvement. Just about every aspects as has been furthered and improved upon creating a display interconnect that has the flexibility, and performance to be a cable to rule them all solution.
Some of the most exciting parts of the new standard are
- Increase in bandwidth to 32.4Gbps
- Support for 4K, 5K and 8K monitors – 5K monitors ( 5120 x 2880 ) will be able to be driven using a single DisplayPort cable without any compression.
- Support for higher resolutions when driving multiple monitor via a single connection ( MST – Multi Stream Transport )
- Conversion support for HDMI including HDMI 2.0 and the new HDCP 2.2 specification.
- Support for multi function interface connectivity including data transport. With its higher 8.1 Gbps per-lane link rate, DisplayPort 1.3 can support a single UHD monitor with 60Hz refresh and 24-bit color over two lanes, while assigning the remaining two lanes to increase capacity for alternate data types, such as SuperSpeed USB 3.0
Overall I am excited about this specification and it helps to ensure that overall the display interconnect is not going to be a limiting factor in the design and development of monitors.
Official PR below
VESA Releases DisplayPort™ 1.3 Standard
Latest Update to Leading Video Interface Pushes Bandwidth to 32.4 Gbits/sec
Newark, CA (15 September 2014) – The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA®) announced the release of the DisplayPort 1.3 audio / video (A/V) standard. An update to the widely used DisplayPort 1.2a standard, this latest version increases the maximum link bandwidth to 32.4 Gbps, with each of four lanes running at a link rate of 8.1 Gbps/lane—a 50% increase from the previous version of the DisplayPort standard. Allowing for transport overhead, DisplayPort’s 32.4 Gbps combined link rate delivers 25.92 Gbps of uncompressed video data.
The increased bandwidth enables higher resolution monitors, including recently announced 5K monitors (with pixel resolutions of 5120 x 2880) using a single DisplayPort cable, without the use of compression. It will also enable higher resolutions when driving multiple monitors through a single connection using DisplayPort’s Multi-Stream feature, such as the use of two 4K UHD monitors, each with a pixel resolution of 3840 x 2160, when using VESA Coordinated Video Timing.
DisplayPort 1.3 continues to support video conversion to VGA, DVI and HDMI. DisplayPort 1.3 adds support for HDCP 2.2 and HDMI 2.0 with CEC (Consumer Electronics Control), which enhances DisplayPort’s utility for television applications, including 4K video with copy protection. The new standard adds support for the 4:2:0 pixel structure, a video format commonly used on consumer digital television interfaces, which enables support for future 8K x 4K displays.
DisplayPort 1.3 also enhances DisplayPort’s value for multi-function interfaces that combine data transport, A/V transport and other capabilities on a single cable. It further refines protocols that enable DisplayPort to share a single cable with other data types. With its higher 8.1 Gbps per-lane link rate, DisplayPort 1.3 can support a single UHD monitor with 60Hz refresh and 24-bit color over two lanes, while assigning the remaining two lanes to increase capacity for alternate data types, such as SuperSpeed USB data as allowed in DockPort™. DisplayPort is the A/V transport standard used by DockPort, Thunderbolt™ and other wired and wireless multi-function interface standards.
“While becoming a mainstream video standard, DisplayPort continues to be at the cutting edge of A/V transport,” said VESA Board of Directors Chair Alan Kobayashi, Fellow & Executive R&D Management for DisplayPort Group at MegaChips Technology America. “These new enhancements to DisplayPort will facilitate both higher resolution displays, as well as easier integration of DisplayPort into multi-protocol data transports, which will satisfy consumer’s desire for simplicity and ease-of-use.”
The DisplayPort standard is offered to VESA members without any license fee. For more information about DisplayPort, please visit http://www.displayport.org or connect with us onYouTube.