A tweet by former HardOCP chap and ex-Intel employee, Kyle Benett, maybe the first hint of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs using the DisplayPort 2.1 standard.

AMD & Intel Feature Better Display Capabilities Than NVIDIA? RDNA 3 Rumored To Get DisplayPort 2.1 Support

It is unusual for a new product to release without support for newer technologies. DisplayPort 2.0 was available starting in 2019. Integration of the product support never came to light, and current and more recent NVIDIA GPUs only support DisplayPort 1.4a. Intel is the only company that is using the current 2.0 standard in the company’s Arc GPUs.

Kyle Bennet, a Twitter user, posted the tweet below yesterday. The image is from the HardForum website.

Verification from multiple sources that @Radeon Navi 31 will support upcoming DisplayPort 2.1 specification. I am tremendously surprised that @NVIDIAGeForce 4090 only supports DP 1.4a. Props to @LinusTech for calling out the DP1.4/4090 shortcomings! https://t.co/eW84VicAZr pic.twitter.com/4fmOtcnlth

— Kyle Bennett (@KyleBennett) October 12, 2022

There could be a reason for this decision by NVIDIA. When the company held an official GeForce RTX 40 series question and answer session, with the results posted on September 21st, one of the questions asked of the company was, “Why isn’t DisplayPort 2.0 listed on the spec sheet?” The company responded that the “current DisplayPort 1.4 standard already supports 8K at 60Hz. Support for DisplayPort 2.0 in consumer gaming displays [is] still a ways away in the future.” It appears NVIDIA does not want to throw caution to the wind in offering the newest specification ahead of full integration.

The DisplayPort 2.0 technology allows for a few different configurations. While it does offer support up to 16K resolutions, there is very little to no support for that high of a resolution, and most audiences do not adopt that high of a display resolution. Two displays at 8K resolutions using the DP 2.0 spec can offer a 120Hz refresh rate with a screen resolution of 7680 x 4320. However, three 4K displays at 3840 x 2160 will produce a 90Hz refresh rate.

Another reason that NVIDIA is slow to adopt the current DisplayPort 2.0 or 2.1 standards is that the latter is yet to be approved by VESA. VESA handles standardization when it comes to interfaces for displays. Additionally, DP 2.1 cables are accessible in the marketplace, which makes this all the more confusing, especially when NVIDIA revealed several technological advances in its recent keynote last month.

Earlier this year, AMD RDNA 3 GPU and Linux DCN32/321 patches leaked, showing that the company would support DisplayPort 2.0. But, the company also does not yet support DisplayPort 2.1 specifications but appears to approve it ahead of NVIDIA.

There is very little official information given about the new DisplayPort 2.1 specifications. There are rumors that the new display specification will offer support for Ultra-High Bit Rate 20 (UHBR), the highest bandwidth per lane you can receive from DisplayPort specifications, equaling 20 GBits per lane. With DP 2.0 offering three times the bandwidth of DP 1.4, the highest amount of bandwidth, currently, is 80 Gbps, with a data rate of 77.37 Gbps. That would be four lanes total being used by DisplayPort 2.0.

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