Intel Battlemage GPUs To Feature Faster DisplayPort 2.0 Standard
Intel Battlemage GPUs To Feature Faster DisplayPort 2.0 Standard
Phoronix reported that Intel has provided a new series of patches that enables display support for its upcoming Battlemage (Xe2) GPUs – while this sounds bog standard on the surface, one interesting detail discovered by Videocardz has confirmed the GPU’s display capabilities.
The changelog in the patch reads:
Removed UHBR20 support
drm/i915/xe2hpd: Set maximum DP rate to UHBR13.5
In case you have no idea what the letter stands for, here’s a refresher: UHBR, or Ultra High Bit Rate, is part of the DisplayPort 2.0 standard which splits the protocol into three bandwidth categories – UHBR10, UHBR13.5, and UHBR20. The numbers stand for the speed in megabits it can transmit per lane – so take that number times 4, and you get the theoretical maximum bandwidth of a particular standard.
AMD is the first of the three major GPU vendors today to use the new DisplayPort 2.0 standard, with the Radeon RX 7000 series already supporting UHBR13.5 standard today across all models, while the workstation Radeon PRO models support the faster UHBR20 standard, which delivers a maximum resolution of 8K 60Hz with no DSC (Display Stream Compression).
Currently, Intel Alchemist GPUs support UHBR10, providing a maximum resolution of 4K 120Hz, 5K 60Hz, or 8K 30Hz. The spec bump to UHBR13.5 means it can push higher resolution on the same refresh rate, or higher refresh rate at the same resolution. In this case, we’re looking at up to 4K 180Hz, 5K 100Hz, or 8K 50Hz without DSC. Notably, no GPUs under NVIDIA support DisplayPort 2.0 today.
However, monitors with resolutions of 4K 120Hz and beyond are still few and far between, so the lack of the fastest DisplayPort standard is unlikely to bother many people right now. Still, given that GPUs can be used for a long time as long as the performance keeps up, having a future-proof display standard is a nice thing to have many years down the road.
Pokdepinion: UHBR20 could be a bit far fetched today, but at least UHBR13.5 is an improvement.
