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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is totally accurate. Apple lists several non-TB devices as compatible like the iPad Air 5th Gen. In the Ars Technica review of it the author mentions it worked just fine on the USB C ports of their Radeon RX 6800 just with the devices running at USB 2 speeds. Perhaps something else is at play with the Nvidia card/drivers?

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It's accurate. The Studio Display connects the same way as the Apple XDR Display and the newer revisions of the LG 5k Ultrafine, and you can read dozens of pages of people trying different ways to get things working.

The problems are…

- Very, very few Nvidia or ATI cards have USB-C video out. They seemed to stop caring when VR failed to take off a couple years ago.

- So you're left using DisplayPort-to-USBC — but have to find a high-bandwidth DP 1.4 cable. Many of these are incorrectly marked or advertised.

- HDMI to DisplayPort/USB-C is a whole other game I won't cover here.

- even with the DisplayPort working, you cannot control screen brightness or get audio without a USB signal

- which can be solved with some very esoteric Wacom and Belkin VR devices

- but which appear to not run a fast enough USB spec to be useful with the new Studio Display due to all its A13-driven weirdness

- also some setups may require a USB signal to even turn on? I'm a little unclear on this mark.

I've been through several of these hoops trying to get the earlier, TB-only LG 5k working with anything beyond a MacBook, so I've been watching these discussions with interest.

Yes, but you don't need TB 3 on your PC. It's at least doable with some AMD cards as evidenced by the Ars review. Clearly something is up with how the USB C port on the 3090 interacts with the monitor. Whether that's on Apple's side or Nvidia's.

There's no USB-C port on the 3090 he linked. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...

Ah yeah I mis-read but it is possible with a GPU with USB C and not necessarily TB.

VR failed to take off? by what metric

PCVR is still very expensive to get into, and last I checked the most popular HMD on SteamVR was still the original Vive.

And we also only have a few high budget/tier games that are made for VR (arguably, only HL Alyx)

The Quest isn't really relevant here, and it's also extremely heavily subsidized.

It is by no means mainstream.

Must have last checked a while ago, because the Vive is #4 these days at 7.3%; 47% of the headsets used with SteamVR are Quest 2, with the original Quest making up another 3.8%.

The Vive wireless adapter costs as much as the Quest 2. So for anyone wanting to cut the cord, it was a no brainer.

What failed to take off specifically (and what I imagine the poster was referring to) is VirtualLink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualLink

This is the standard that was implemented into cards for a couple years in the hopes it would result in headsets that connected to a computer with single cable. Compatible headsets never materialized so the port disappeared

Every

The Windows ecosystem mess is why Apple says capabilities may vary.

- Yes, plenty of people including USB-C advocates like Benson Leung really wish NVIDIA didn't drop it for the 30-series. Most new laptops have an appropriate port, however, and probably at least a quarter of new motherboards.

- A low bandwidth cable should work; if link training appropriately trains an HBR2 link then it should light up at 4k60 (or 5k60 if DSC is supported.) The more likely issue is that his original cable was one of the majority of USB-C -> DisplayPort cables that is unidirectional in the wrong direction. They only advertise USB-C -> DP, after all.

- The internal webcam and speakers are connected to the USB 2.0 bus; you can verify this in System Profiler on a Mac when connected via Thunderbolt. Whatever is going wrong with the Wacom link is not because USB 2.0 doesn't have enough bandwidth.

>The Windows ecosystem mess

You mean the PC ecosystem. Microsoft did not design the specs for USB, TB and DisplayPort.

Still, I'd much rather have this ecosystem "mess" that's more or less open and has healthy competition with a variety of solid options, rather than an ecosystem where stuff mostly just works but is 100% proprietary and locks you into a walled garden designed for rent seeking, planned obsolescence and e-waste generation (i.e. Apple that sells monitors with non user removable power cables attached to them).

Yep, all your observations reflect what I've observed with the Studio Display. As for the last point, I also have seen the display fail to wake up if it doesn't get a signal it likes (alternatively requiring me to simply unplug/plug-in again, reboot my machine, or change cables). Now that I have an approach that successfully works on boot and supports display sleep, I'll probably never touch it again

This is just a general problem: The term "USB C" doesn't mean anything other than the shape of the cable. There are various ways to transport video and/or audio over that connect and a given port on your PC may support a subset of them or none. Some thunderbolt ports can be used to connect an external GPU, for example, but even if it's connected your motherboard or bios might not support actually talking to that external GPU. On windows there is often a thunderbolt app on the system that you can open to see which TB features your built-in ports support... but if you're trying to plug into your GPU's USB-C port, now it's up to that specific hardware revision and your drivers to control what can happen there in cooperation with your PC and maybe your bios.

> non-TB devices as compatible like the iPad Air 5th Gen.

iPads are now TB devices.

Not iPad Air, only iPad Pro

Latest iPad Air with M1?

Yes. They kept it USB-C, presumable to leave some differentiation for the Pro models https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/specs/

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