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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Im confused why there was any question of wether it supported HDR or not. Apple has had it listed for a while: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980

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Also this is confusing because I would expect it's not the chip that "supports" colours but the display. If you hook an M1 Mac Mini up to an old display that uses 8 bit colour you're not going to get "billions of colors"

If they are talking about the laptops, it should be that the Laptops/laptop displays supports billions of colors.

> Also this is confusing because I would expect it's not the chip that "supports" colours but the display.

Is't the chip SoC and so includes the graphics hardware? Doesn't that bit have to support the colours?

You could probably make it happen with any graphics hardware, but it might be slow with some.

That's not how graphics hardware works. If the busses to the output are only so wide, you can't make them wider with software.

You need both. For e.g. if you take an older GPU like GTX 280, that's not going to output 4K or HDR signal.

Well if you find the right model it should be possible, you should have cited something even earlier. The chip in a GTX 280 is capable of 10-bit output and displayport output, so that gets you at least 4K at 30 fps.

(I can't find an example model that had displayport, but I can find earlier models that did.)

Author here: I found this page after writing the blog but found it surprising that Apple has listed HDR support here but not on the actual product pages.

Yeah, Apple documentation isn't always so great. A month ago HT210980 still claimed that MacBook Air M1 can't play HDR on external displays [1]. It nice that they have now updated that document.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218041928/https://support.a...

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