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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

DisplayPort never caught on in the home entertainment market - have you ever seen a DisplayPort TV? And why would there be one, when everyone’s happy with HDMI?

DisplayPort, for most intents and purposes, has lost the format war. You buy a laptop - it’s HDMI on the side, not DisplayPort. You buy a monitor - DisplayPort is never an exclusive port on any model, but HDMI is.

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Why do you assert that everyone is happy with HDMI? It has a lot of problems even before we get into the technical details. For example, it is so secretive and closed that the HDMI forum won't even let AMD implement HDMI 2.1 in their Linux driver: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...

Wasn't the DRM black box the whole reason why HDMI exists? Like I personally don't give a shit about that but content distributors do.

> DisplayPort, for most intents and purposes, has lost the format war. You buy a laptop - it’s HDMI on the side, not DisplayPort.

The laptops USB-C ports probably speak DisplayPort though. There was another USB-C alt mode which carried HDMI instead but that spec was abandoned, DisplayPort is the de facto standard USB-C video protocol now.

Yeah, DisplayPort "lost" w/r/t the connector but it seems like DP-over-USB-C is the way forward.

Being able to put video, audio, power, and USB connectivity over one relatively common connector seems like the obvious choice.

I would argue the opposite - DisplayPort has won the computing format war, especially on laptops. Most laptops will have at least two USB-C ports with DisplayPort tunneling. Most business PCs have only DisplayPort connectivity, with the assumption that you'll buy a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter (if you have an older monitor that only supported HDMI).

True, we will never see them on the TV, but on the computer it is all DisplayPort.

If you buy a ThinkPad, an IdeaPad, or a MacBook Pro, what port is on the right side?

I just checked my thinkpad fleet, excluding VGA: one has no extra video port, one has HDMI, and 4 have displayport only.

Thinkpads will usually have multiple DisplayPorts (some as alt-mode on USB-C), and 1 HDMI for use with roach-motel-quality conference room setups.

My MacBook Pro has one HDMI and one DisplayPort on the right side. The left side has two DisplayPort and a MagSafe.

Edit: And a MacBook Air would have just the two DisplayPort on the left with no HDMI, plus headphone jack on the right.

The MacBooks HDMI port is also just a usb device internally. Utilising DisplayPort alt mode.

HDMI replaced VGA as the "lowest common denominator port" for conference usage, not as major display tech.

HDMI is also for various reasons very tightly bound with home entertainment ecosystem because the DRM is mandatory while it's optional in DisplayPort.

Meanwhile DisplayPort has effectively won the format war for computer displays, and on all newer display connectors.

> Meanwhile DisplayPort has effectively won the format war for computer displays, and on all newer display connectors.

Not on this planet - for the highest end displays, maybe. Almost every small business and government office I see is still using VGA.

Interesting, I don't think I've seen VGA anywhere outside retro setups or places that were setup once long ago and left like that. I think many people don't even know there was such a thing as VGA these days if they work in office.

That said, HDMI 1.0 being DVI-D in different connector means conversion to VGA is very easy, as DVI-D stream is essentially VGA data minus DAC step (including vsync blanking and overscan).

I'd say not even the highest end displays. I'm using HDMI 2.1 on my RTX 4080 because it has more bandwidth than the DisplayPort 1.4 ports on this graphic card.

It's a similar port selection on even the highest end monitors: 40 Gigabit/s HDMI 2.1, or 26 Gigabit DP1.4. I'm unable to find a single DP2.0 monitor.

IIRC main difference was that DP1.4 at 26gbit was more than enough to drive 4k displays

Sure, but if we're talking about high-end displays, 4K by itself isn't exactly high-end anymore. A 4 year old Playstation 5 can output not just 4K, but also 120hz with 10-bit HDR colour. This requires ~32 Gigabit/s, more than DP1.4

https://linustechtips.com/topic/729232-guide-to-display-cabl...

I'm personally on a 1440p240hz monitor. With HDR, this barely squeaks over DP1.4's bandwidth.

Well, yes. Another part that prevented more rapid adoption of DP2.0 other than longer and longer upgrade cycle of GPUs and displays is that another option is to just use 2 cables for 51 Gbit/s which was also a thing with early 4k displays.

Did DisplayPort support bonding signals like that? Or would it just show up as 2 separate monitors to the GPU?

It requires compatible GPUs, but it's how early 5k@60Hz displays were connected using DisplayPort 1.2, and how very large displays are connected in general. Among displays that used this was for example Dell UP2715K and early LG UltraFine 5k, but I heard that Apple's XDR display uses it as well to avoid utilizing DSC by setting up 2 DisplayPort 1.4 tunnels over TB3 and using tiled mode.

The display device provides DisplayID block id 0x28 "Tiled Display Technology" with description of tiling, which is then used on GPU side to properly configure framebuffer -> DP sources mappings so that from userland you see one display.

The DisplayID block also explicitly supports things like declaring bevels etc. if necessary.

That's just nvidia being cheap.

>Almost every small business and government office I see is still using VGA.

I dont know where you are from but all Government Office and SME I have been to ( and I have been to a lot ) all have HDMI for their TV since at least 2020. They may have VGA lying around but they are not used. In fact the last time I went to an office that doesn't have HDMI port and only VGA was roughly 2016 or 2018.

> HDMI replaced VGA as the "lowest common denominator port" for conference usage, not as major display tech.

I know a fair share of rancid conference rooms where the cabling is still 20 years old...

The decision to replace VGA with HDMI on Thinkpads was literally driven by market research deciding that likelihood of encountering HDMI setups was bigger than VGA by then.

That’s not really true. Any device with USB-C video out is using DisplayPort, not HDMI. HDMI alt mode exists, but AFAIK never shipped in any products.

If it’s not the physical connector, is it even worth calling DisplayPort? It might as well be called something else, that happens to run over a DP connector or a USB-C connector. It’s winning in a spiritual sense where nobody intuitively knows it’s DisplayPort.

It's worth it because it matters to simple cases of normal user needing a converter dongle. Passive USB-C DP-altmode to DP cable are easy to acquire, cheap, and work fine.

USB-C -> HDMI is usually expensive because nearly nobody uses HDMI as alt-mode outside few old devices so you end up with frustrated users who try to buy cheaper converter and find out it does not work.

Looks to me like USB-C/HDMI cables are in the 5-20 EUR price range, about the same as USB-C/DP. I just got a new USB-C hub with HDMI port (4k@60) for about 15 EUR. Simple HDMI or DP cables (ie. same port on both ends) are available for 2-3 EUR, are there USB-C/DP cables in that range?

I wish the opposite was easier to find, since I have one display device with only a USB-C input, and a desktop computer.

I had this issue as well - Amazon (did?) have a bi-directional USB-C to DisplayPort cable [0], which works well for me. It looks like the 3ft one is still available.

[0] - https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B081VK1KHV/

There is also MHL alt-mode over USB-C. MHL was a way to do video over microUSB at the time and I really can't figure out if any products released with USB-C MHL support either.

I'm seeing less and less HDMI ports on computer monitors, graphics cards, projectors, etc. Since IIRC they charge a royalty per port, this makes a lot of sense.

I buy a laptop - it's USB only. No HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, headphone jack or anything else. When was the last time you bought one?

I buy a desktop graphics card. 1 HDMI - for compatibility, you know - and 3 DisplayPort. The HDMI is port number 2.

Last time I used a projector it was DisplayPort or VGA. I brought brought both kinds of adapters just in case.

My newest monitor has power input, DisplayPort and VGA. No HDMI.

"I buy a laptop - it's USB only. No HDMI, DisplayPort..."

So it has no video output?

It has a screen, and it has the USB-C port alternate channels connected to the GPU.

Besides DisplayPort over USB-C that people have already mentioned there's also eDP which is basically the standard for connecting a laptop's screen to its GPU. You buy a laptop, regardless of what external port it has, DisplayPort is used on the internal display. And since most laptop users don't regularly connect to external displays, one can certainly say that the usage of DisplayPort here far eclipses HDMI.

DisplayPort in a way won. USB-C video is DisplayPort. And the HDMI port on your laptop is just an internal USB adapter for DisplayPort alt mode for hdmi.

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