This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use

VESA has announced the upcoming version of DisplayPort, with a substantial number of features and capabilities intended to improve visual quality and allow for increased resolution scaling.

But while resolution is the typical leading feature for a new standard, in this case, it’s just one of the changes VESA is introducing. DisplayPort 2.0 offers 80Gb of bandwidth, or 2.46x as much as DisplayPort 1.3/1.4. Effective bandwidth is 77.37Gbps, up from 25.92Gbps, an increase of 2.98x. The reason the effective gain is larger than the theoretical standard gain is because of additional efficiency baked into the data encoding standard, which allows DP2.0 to use a higher percentage of its theoretical bandwidth.

DP2.0 packs enough bandwidth to allow for native 8K support without any kind of color compression or chroma subsampling. Even HDR can be supported with this kind of bandwidth jump. Up to 16K panels can now be connected with DP2.0 and DSC compression, while 10K@60Hz with 24-bit color and 4:4:4 (no chroma subsampling) is available in uncompressed form.

Under the Hood

While the physical plugs and backward-compatibility aren’t changing, DP2.0 is actually being implemented using USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, which Intel released royalty-free earlier this year. As a result, both USB4 and DisplayPort 2.0 will be implementations of Thunderbolt under the hood. Where TB is designed to provide bi-directional links of 40Gbps (four wires in two pairs, with each wire capable of sending 20Gbps and one pair for inbound versus outbound communications), DisplayPort only needs to concern itself with one direction of transmission.

All four Thunderbolt connections, therefore, are devoted to transmission, and voila — 80Gbps of signal. This is part of where DisplayPort’s efficiency gain comes from — the move to 128/132-bit signaling reduces overhead substantially compared with DP1.0-1.4, which used 8/10-bit signaling. This is similar to the step PCIe 3.0 took to boost efficiency over PCIe 2.0 years ago.

Cable replacements, however, may be required. DP2.0 introduces three bit rates per lane, at 10Gbps, 13.5Gbps, and 20Gbps. Currently, there are plans to build passive cables for the UHBR 10 standard, which delivers 40Gbps or half the bandwidth that the standard theoretically supports. Any DP cables you see marked 8K ready are UHBR 10 and should conform to the link’s requirements.

For now, however, VESA hasn’t sketched out anything past this. Active cabling may be required to push the kinds of 10K – 16K displays that DP2.0 will theoretically support.

Once-optional features like Forward Error Compression and Panel Replay are now mandatory (Panel Replay is an advanced form of Panel Self Refresh). Adaptive-Sync, however, will remain an optional feature. Manufacturers are not required to support it.

Ordinarily, there’s a substantial lag between when a new standard is available and when GPUs pick it up, but the fact that DisplayPort 2.0 is based on Thunderbolt could speed overall adoption. With DP2.0 now finished, we could see the first supporting cards by late 2020.

Now Read: