VESA Announces DisplayPort 2.1 With New Bandwidth Management And Backward Compatibility

VESA has announced a newer version 2.1 of the DisplayPort specification, making it backward compatible with version 2.0 and a new bandwidth management feature, a new DSC codec, and more. It claims that this can reduce bandwidth usage by as much as 67 percent without causing visual artifacts. 

The new DisplayPort 2.1 is backward compatible with DisplayPort 2.0, as the standards organisation said, “all previously certified DisplayPort 2.0 products… have already been certified to the stricter DisplayPort 2.1 spec.” That means, all GPUs, docking stations, monitors, and cables certified with DisplayPort 2.0 are automatically migrated to the stricter 2.1 version. 

There are also updates to the DisplayPort cable specs. VESA aims for longer cable lengths, going over two meters, along with increased bit rate and support for more lanes, resulting in higher throughput. 

“VESA certified DP40 cables support up to the UHBR10 link rate (10 Gbps), with four lanes, providing a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. VESA certified DP80 cables support up to the UHBR20 link rate (20 Gbps), with four lanes, providing a maximum throughput of 80 Gbps,” the organisation said. 

Among the things added to the DisplayPort specification is a new bandwidth management feature. According to VESA, that enables “DisplayPort tunneling to coexist with other I/O data traffic more efficiently over the USB4 link.”

This comes on top of new mandated support for VESA’s visually lossless display stream compression (DSC) codec and VESA’s Panel Replay capability, which together reduces bandwidth usage by as much as 67% without causing visual artifacts. The panel replace capability also reduces tunneling packet transport bandwidth by over 99 percent in certain situations. The organisation claimed that the new specifications for DisplayPort 2.1 offers ample bandwidth for the needs of virtually every practical application. 

AMD and Intel are expected to announce support for DisplayPort 2.1 soon. Presently, they come with DisplayPort 2.0, which in comparison with NVIDIA’s latest RTX 4090 are still the latest. NVIDIA currently has support for DisplayPort 1.4.