DisplayPort 2.1 specification officially released

More than three years after the birth of the DisplayPort 2.0, the VESA organization today officially released the DisplayPort 2.1 specification (hereinafter referred to as DP 2.1).

This time, instead of making a big deal about bandwidth, it is firmly integrated with USB4. Coupled with the Thunderbolt interface in the same form, there is a growing trend towards greater unity.

DP 2.1 has been connected to the USB Type-C specification and USB4 PHY specification at the bottom, thus allowing DP and USB4 interfaces to share a common PHY physical layer service.

At the same time, DP 2.1 adds a new DP bandwidth management mechanism, coupled with VESA's DSC (Display Stream Compression) encoding, Panel Replay (Panel Replay) function, which enables efficient coexistence of DP tunneling with other I/O data transfers on USB4 connections.

Among them, DSC encoding can reduce the DP transmission bandwidth by more than 67% without affecting the picture quality, while the Panel Replay function can reduce the DP tunnel packet transmission bandwidth by more than 99%.

ROG X670E motherboard has made DP, USB4 together

DP 2.1 also upgraded the data cable specification at the same time. Firstly, the length is extended, DP40 data line can exceed 2 meters and DP80 data line can also exceed 1 meter, and both do not affect UHBR performance.

Secondly, the certified DP40 data line passes and can support up to UHBR10 10Gbps, and the four channels combined is 40Gbps; DP80 certified data line supports UHBR20 20Gbps, and the four channels combined is up to 80Gbps.

At both ends of the cable, there will be a DP40 or DP80 mark for users to distinguish.

In terms of product certification and compatibility, VESA said that DP 2.1 remains backward compatible, and all previously certified DP 2.0 products are compliant with the DP 2.1 specification.

In terms of product support, AMD's RX 7000 series graphics cards, which will be released next month, are expected to bring DP 2.1 for the first time.

Currently, Intel Arc A series graphics cards, AMD Raider 7000 series integrated GPU, have supported DP 2.0, NVIDIA RTX 40 series continue to support DP 1.4.

Arc A already supports DP 2.0

NVIDIA RTX 40 is DP 1.4