AMD Cards Will Support HDMI 2.0a And DisplayPort 1.3 Next Year
It’s good to get an insight into what can be expected over the next year when it comes to graphics hardware and AMD have recently shared some information about what to expect from their Radeon GPUs over the next 12 months.
R9 Fury pictured above
In a briefing to press at a technology summit for Radeon Technologies Group, a division formed this year for all AMD’s GPU assets, the company revealed that the latest DisplayPort and HDMI standards would be supported by AMD’s cards in 2016.
DisplayPort 1.2 currently only supports 3840×2160 at 60Hz, meaning that high refresh rates can only support 1080/1440p as a maximum resolution.
DisplayPort 1.3
The maximum resolution for DisplayPort 1.3 is boosted to 7680×4320 at 60Hz, but it can also support high refresh rates beyond 2K such as 4K at 120Hz. It is also possible to support 5K at 60Hz resolutions and 4K at 60Hz with higher colour depths than 8 bit per channel (necessary for a good HDR implementation).
See the following frame from the presentation.
DisplayPort 1.3 will introduce a faster signalling mode for DisplayPort – High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3) – which in turn will allow DisplayPort 1.3 to offer 50% more bandwidth than the current DisplayPort 1.2 and HBR2, boosting DisplayPort’s bandwidth to 32.4 Gbps before overhead.
HDMI 2.0
HDMI 2.0 was launched in 2013 as an update to the HDMI standard, significantly increasing HDMI’s bandwidth to support 4Kp60 TVs, bringing it roughly on par with DisplayPort 1.2 in terms of total bandwidth. Along with the increase in bandwidth, HDMI 2.0/2.0a also introduced support for other new features in the HDMI specification such as the next-generation BT.2020 colour space, 4:2:0 chroma sampling and HDR video.
The fact that HDMI has only recently caught up to DisplayPort 1.2 in bandwidth just as DisplayPort 1.3 is about to be released is one of those consistent oddities in how the two standards are developed.
HDMI is not only the outright standard for TVs, but it’s the de facto standard for PC monitors as well; while you can find DisplayPort in many monitors, you would be hard pressed not to find HDMI. So as 4K monitors become increasingly cheap – and likely start dropping DisplayPort in the process – supporting HDMI 2.0 will be important for monitors just as much as it is for TVs.
FreeSync over HDMI is still proprietary technology at this stage since HDMI hasn’t gone with a common standard for variable refresh rates yet. So for FreeSync to be supported over HDMI, the monitors themselves will need to work with AMD’s special extensions, which in turns means the vendors have to work more closely alongside AMD to get everything going.
It might be the case that FreeSync over DisplayPort becomes more commonplace given that DisplayPort can support far more bandwidth at this stage. HDMI is still vastly more supported than DisplayPort as only 30% of monitors sold can support DisplayPort, with the remaining 70% only carrying ports for either HDMI or HDMI and DVI.