Is there any reason I'd want to use HDMI instead of DisplayPort?
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i...
Yes there are DisplayPort standards that can reach that, but in practice all the top end GPUs have only the old DisplayPort 1.4 version. That means the only choices are to use HDMI 2.1 or to use video compression over DisplayPort 1.4.
I will say that VESA has been very successful with their Display Stream Compression (DSC). Not that the algorithm is something special, but in terms of marketing. You never see monitor reviewers talk about the fact that using DSC will give you artifacts. VESA markets this compression as visually lossless, which every non-expert explains as actually lossless. In reality the losslessness is defined in the standard as when all the observers fail to correctly identify the reference image more than 75% of the trials. Beyond that, like with any compression, it will fail at high entropy images. Take for example this 2017 study titled Large Scale Subjective Evaluation of Display Stream Compression [1] which found that performance on some images was not visually lossless, however, those images were challenging images with high entropy.
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[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317425815_Large_Sca...
(DSC also has a great property of making the image delivery significantly more resilient to cable issues and thus much more reliable for most people using high res monitors.)
No, I use HDMI 2.1 without DSC.
Otherwise though, yes I have very good vision and work with images professionally. I do spot artifacts when they are there.
I get it that not everyone needs perfect images. I mean, people watching YouTube certainly won't be able to tell if there is an additional artifact on top of the low bitrate video they're watching.
What do you mean by 'fixed timing'? The fact that the transmission data rate is proportional to the pixel clock?
We're talking HDMI 2.1 here, which uses FRL (fixed rate link) and thus has pixel clock decoupled from the pixel clock just like for DP, with data split into packets. There's not a lot of difference between DP and HDMI in terms of functionality and complexity.
Indeed, 2.1 seems similar to DP. It would require quite a bit more logic to do that.
I wonder how many TVs support that?
This pretty much locks any media players into proprietary drivers.
It’s powered by this chipset afaik which supports vrr and hdr. https://www.connect.synaptics.com/spyder
It is also a USB-C to HDMI adapter, not a pure DP adapter. I think only the 20-series of Nvidia GPUs and maybe some of the 5000-series AMD GPUs have DP capable USB-C outputs. And apparently the M1/M2 Macs that the first article is about.
CableMatters is a good brand so if anyone could do it it'd be them, but it appears it's not quite there yet. Maybe when DP 2.0 becomes more common on GPUs it'll be a solved issue.
Based on my experience, this doesn't matter. I have a video card with no USB-C outputs. I go from full-sized DisplayPort to a female <-> female DisplayPort coupler, to this [0] bidirectional DP <-> USB-C cable, which plugs into my monitor. It works great and even does 4K 60FPS uncompressed HDR no problem.
I see no reason why you'd be unable to then slap on a female <-> female USB-C coupler and then that USB-C -> HDMI adapter.
(There's also no reason you couldn't cut out the first DP cable and coupler and plug the DP <-> USB-C cable directly into the video card. I just have very long (fiber-optic) DP cables that the second cable plugs into.)
I had a problem with Windows and AMD drivers where in this configuration the integrated GPU would run full throttle despite not doing anything serious, making the system run hot.
I "solved" it by using the DisplayPort - 10°C difference on the CPU and, more importantly, no throttling.
I am writing this in Linux, while looking at a Dell monitor connected through DisplayPort, and my loudspeakers are connected to an audio output of the monitor.