AMD's RX 7900 XT cards allegedly support unannounced DisplayPort 2.1 connectors

Even though DisplayPort 2.0 has been available for three years now with almost double the bandwidth of the HDMI 2.1 standard, Nvidia and AMD cards still do not offer such ports. Intel, on the other hand, includes DP 2.0 support on the freshly released Arc A5 / A7 series, and it looks like AMD is finally stepping up with the soon-to-be-released RX 7000 GPUs that allegedly offer DP 2.1 support.

Kyle Bennet from HardOCP is reporting that multiple insider sources confirmed AMD’s inclusion of the DP 2.1 specs on the Navi 31 flagship GPUs. However, the exact specs for the 2.1 iteration are still unknown. Videocardz suggests that DP 2.1 would support the Ultra-High Bit Rate standard with 80 Gb/s bandwidth. For reference, DP 2.0 offers 77.37 Gb/s that can support a 16K display with 60 Hz refresh rate, two 4K displays @ 144 Hz or three 4K displays @ 90 Hz. HDMI 2.1, in comparison, offers 48 Gb/s with a maximum supported spec of 10K @ 120 Hz.

Three years after the DP 2.0 launch, Nvidia still only offers DP 1.4 connectors on the new RTX 4000 cards. DP 1.4 is inferior to HDMI 2.1 since it offers 32 Gb/s bandwidth with support for 8K @ 60 Hz or 4K @ 120 Hz (without Display Compression Streaming). For some reason, Nvidia is unwilling to adopt the latest DP versions, as the company recently stated that “ DisplayPort 2.0 in consumer gaming displays are still a ways away in the future.”

The RTX 4090 cards sure offer overpowering raw performance, yet it is quite puzzling to see only DP 1.4 and PCIe 4.0 on such a high-end solution. AMD’s RX 7900 XT cards may not end up as fast as the RTX 4090, but they could become the first gaming cards to support DP 2.1 and PCIe 5.0.

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