ProMotion on Apple Displays

[turbineseaplane]

I just wanted to clear something up regarding high refresh rate panels and the potential for ProMotion external displays from Apple.

Some folks have hinted that Thunderbolt 4 can't handle the bandwidth and that's why we don't have these displays right now.
That is wholly incorrect.

With the use of DSC (display stream compression), Thunderbolt 4 can can actually do 8k at 144hz with full 10 bit color

We don't have high refresh rate, high pixel count, large external displays from Apple for potentially many reasons, but it is decidedly not due to connection protocols and technologies.

I saw a great tweet talking about this and I'll include that users posted image here also.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1509999903207944194

 

[haruhiko]

The tweet from Marc Edwards is gold. I love it.

 

[537635]

I am one of "those folks". I was under the impression, that current standards and cables simply do not support this.

Thank you very much for this. Good info. So there is real option of having 6k 32'' with ProMotion on existing hardware?

 

[magamo]

Not only does a monitor need to support Thunderbolt 4, but your computer also has to have a functioning Thunderbolt 4 port. Quite a lot of Apple computers including very recent ones such as 2020 M1 MacBook Air and 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro only have Thunderbolt 3 ports. Besides, there are practically no options when it comes to long Thunderbolt 4 cables. Apple does promise a 3m version, but it's still in the "coming soon" stage, which may not even hit the market anyway. While I wish Apple had released a retina display with ProMotion and full HDR, it's hard to imagine it happens anytime soon...

 

[ataq]

It will come very soon from Apple. They just need more reasons to sell a higher priced display compared to the Studio Display. The ASD seems like a steal in price conpared to the XDR, although lacking exactly the missing features beside 6k.
It‘s (always) all about psychology when working on new products and pricing them.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Not only does a monitor need to support Thunderbolt 4, but your computer also has to have a functioning Thunderbolt 4 por

Did you read the tweet?

Thunderbolt 3 can do 5K/144Hz with DSC - right now

TB4 isn’t required for an ASM with ProMotion

 

[magamo]

Did you read the tweet?

Thunderbolt 3 can do 5K/144Hz with DSC - right now

TB4 isn’t required for an ASM with ProMotion

Yes, I did. It seems that you could, in principle, transmit a 5k stream at 120Hz over thunderbolt 3 as long as you're ok with using up a substantial amount of bandwidth only for this data stream. For instance, I read somewhere that 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro comes with Titan Ridge as its thunderbolt controller, so if you resort to 4 lane HBR3 (or 8 lane HBR2) with DSC, you could, in theory, send your video data to your external monitor. I would be very surprised if this set up would leave enough bandwidth for other stuff required/expected for a display of this caliber, such as 10Gb/s ports, though.

 

[turbineseaplane]

@magamo

Thanks for coming back and following up
Doesn’t happen enough around here.

Cheers

 

[jacklivehere]

Do we know if thunderbolt 4 can support 5k at 120 and also USB-C Ports at 10GB? Based on chart on slide earlier on thread, to support 5K/120 monitor we need to loose USB-C ports with 10GB