Support for DisplayPort 2.1 Boosted by Nvidia Adoption
There was a big boost for 8K display interfaces at CES this year. As we reported on the 8K Association website, HDMI announced Version 2.2 of HDMI with output boosted to 95Gbps allowing resolutions up to 8K at 240Hz.
At the show, VESA also announced improvements to the DisplayPort V2.1 with an upgrade to V2.1b. Version 2.1 already supported outputs up to 80Gbps with support for dual displays in 8K at 120Hz when DisplayStream Compression (DSC) is used. The new 2.1b version adds support for active cables up to 3M when the previous version was only rated for 1M passive cables.
HDMI vs DisplayPort
HDMI is the standard for connection to consumer (and a lot of professional) TVs and audio visual equipment. On the other hand, DisplayPort has been an important standard in PC and monitor applications.
It had been something of a surprise that while AMD introduced support for DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR13.5 (54Gbps) back in November 2022, Nvidia had not announced support for this standard. This changed at CES 2025 when Nvidia announced its Series 50 GPUs. The four new cards based on Series 50 all support the latest DisplayPort 2.1b version with UHBR20 and the cards are rated to support 8K at up to 165Hz with 12 bit HDR for maximum visual impact.
Of course, generating the images needed to send at these high frame rates with the full immersive 8K resolution is a real challenge. Nvidia has got around this potential barrier by adopting a technology that it calls ‘Multi Frame Generation’ that is part of its DLSS 4 suite of enhancements. The technology automatically generates up to three additional intermediate frames for each fully rendered frame. There is a video explaining how DLSS 4 uses ‘neural rendering’ AI for the process. The early reviewers of this technology were very impressed with the 8K performance and reduced artifacts with the new DLSS 4 techniques. Nvidia said that 75 games and applications had support for Multi Frame Generation.
Other reviewers at DSO Gaming were impressed that rendering at 8K and then downscaling to display on a 4K monitor produced visibly better image quality.
The 8K Association is working with equipment vendors and plans to show 8K high refresh gaming at future trade shows. Display makers are working hard to ensure support for these new high frame rate modes as the higher frame rates combine with the increased immersion of 8K resolution to boost the involvement in games. As we reported from Display Week in 2023, TCL/CSOT, the LCD panel maker, has already demonstrated an 85″ 8K LCD panel for TVs with 120Hz refresh rates.
Video is Not Neglected
The Nvidia 50 Series has a lot of power for video applications as well as for gaming. Powerful GPUs are really helpful when editing and post-processing high resolution and high quality video.
Nvidia claims that the new 50 series chips have added hardware support for encoding and decoding the 4:2:2 pro-grade color format and this means an 11X encoding speed increase compared to software encoders. The decoder can play back up to eight 4K60 4:2:2 video streams simultaneously. That’s equivalent to two streams of high quality 8K per decoder.
The top of the line GeForce RTX 5090 GPU is equipped with three encoders and two decoders, the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU includes two encoders and two decoders, the 5070 Ti GPUs has two encoders with a single decoder, and the GeForce RTX 5070 GPU includes a single encoder and decoder. These multi-encoder and decoder setups, paired with faster GPUs, enable the GeForce RTX 5090 to export video 60% faster than the GeForce RTX 4090 and at 4x speed compared with the GeForce RTX 3090.
(An aside on the 4:2:2 terminology…. These numbers represent the relative proportions of color information in a signal – so called ‘chroma sub-sampling’. Computer graphics use 4:4:4 – that is the same number of color samples as brightness. However, consumer video typically uses 4:2:0, with professional video preferring the higher quality of 4:2:2. 4:2:0 is generally enough for viewing, but not for color grading and post-processing. Check here for more information on the topic)
Nvidia’s 9th Gen NVENC video encoders in the new series include a 5% improvement to HEVC and AV1 encoding quality, and a new AV1 Ultra Quality mode that offers an additional 5% improvement to encoding efficiency.
These new video technologies have already been included in applications in collaboration with Adobe Premiere Pro, Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, Capcut and Wondershare Filmora.
GTC Reveals New Pro GPU
We delayed this week’s article as Nvidia was holding its GPU Technology Conference and we wanted to hear the keynote before publication. However, as expected, the keynote was absolutely focused on AI, robotics, data centers and autonomous vehicles. Nvidia is keen to get its messages out about AI and we counted 37 separate press releases issued on the first day of the conference!
Still, Nvidia did manage to introduce a new RTX Pro Blackwell series of GPUs for professional workstations and with variants for desktop PCs and notebooks. The Verge reports that the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for workstations will ship with 96GB of GDDR7 memory and needs 600 watts of power, slightly more than the 575 watts of the RTX 5090. Like the RTX 5090, it will support DisplayPort 2.1.
There is more detail on the GPU variants here.
Alongside the GTC, Nvidia runs the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2025). The company released the latest ‘Zorah’ tech demo, which showed the power of the firm’s ray tracing technology based on Unreal 5. There is a short, but amazingly life-like clip. The clip, Nvidia said, was rendered in real time using a GeForce RTX 5090.
