Just yesterday news broke that VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) had officially presented the DisplayPort 1.4 specificationsIn other words, the latest version of the standard for the transmission of audio and video data. This specification has been widely used by Mac computers for a long time and will surely be adopted in new computers in the future.
This arrival of the new standard responds to the ever increased demand for high resolution support or the new technology applied to screens called HDR. Currently, new devices such as the latest MacBook have USB type C connections or MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt and compatible with DisplayPort 1.2, connections that provide enough bandwidth to display 4K images at 60Hz through a single cable. .
The arrival of these new specifications is again caused by advances in technology, the support of high resolution resolutions or HDR. Let's remember that about a year ago, VESA released DisplayPort 1.3 to increase the bandwidth and that in this way with a single cable content could be transmitted 5K and 8K at 60 and 30 Hz respectively, but it finally looks like the new standard will be Display Port 1.4, a specification that is capable of carrying content 8K to 60Hz and that also supports HDR in both 5K and 8K.
The best part of all this is that this version of DisplayPort makes use of an image compression without any visual loss providing a bandwidth of 8.1 Gbps per lane, hence 8K image can be displayed at 60Hz and 4K at 120Hz with HDR. In addition, with the Expanded audio transport specification, it expands up to 32 audio channels and all popular audio formats.
However, not everything is good news and it is that DisplayPort 1.3 has not yet been contemplated not even in the latest Intel processors, the Skylake, so it is more than likely that we will have to wait to see a Thunderbolt 5K screen until at least next year integrating DisplayPort 1.4 and who knows, maybe Apple gives the surprise with a screen capable of playing 8K content.