Release of 8K displays held up by ongoing supply chain disruptions

The release of 8K monitors using DisplayPort 2.0 was originally expected in late 2020, but standards body VESA says because of the worldwide impacts of the coronavirus, they are not expected now until some point later in 2021.

Almost two years since the standard for DisplayPort 2.0 was published and promised up to 16K monitors, none have gone on sale. Now the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA) says they were delayed by the pandemic, but are coming in 2021.

"Monitors supporting DisplayPort 2.0 are currently in development, but none have been released to market yet," a VESA spokesperson told The Verge. "DisplayPort 2.0 is working now in new system chips that should appear in products later in 2021."

The pandemic meant that VESA's "Plugtests" events were cancelled. Typically both hardware developers and engineers test out systems and interoperability at Plugtests, and the events are key to the development of the displays.

"In 2020 VESA had no PlugTests, which has slowed the deployment of DisplayPort 2.0," said the VESA spokesperson. "VESA is now planning our next PlugTest for this Spring in Taiwan, so we expect to get this process rolling again."

Of all the multiple connectors and different ways of putting an image on a Mac screen, the forthcoming DisplayPort 2.0 is expected to offer more than high resolution. Beyond explicit 8K support, VESA's specification for DisplayPort 2.0 includes improved refresh rates, and HDR support.

The DisplayPort 2.0 spec is technically supported by the Thunderbolt ports on Apple Silicon Macs. It isn't clear if the first generation of Macs with M1 processors will support 8K displays, though.

11 Comments

bfranks 24 comments · 5 Years

About 3 years ago

When you say DisplayPort 2.0 is supported on Apple Silicon Mac, I assume that the M1 Macs won’t support 8K monitors ? It would be strange to be able to drive an 8K monitor but not 2 displays. Is it a hard limit on M1 Macs or something Apple with enable later I wonder ?

Mike Wuerthele 6901 comments · 8 Years

bfranks said:

When you say DisplayPort 2.0 is supported on Apple Silicon Mac, I assume that the M1 Macs won’t support 8K monitors ? It would be strange to be able to drive an 8K monitor but not 2 displays. Is it a hard limit on M1 Macs or something Apple with enable later I wonder ?

You can apply that logic to the Pro Display XDR as well. The Pro Display XDR is 6016 x 3384 - over twenty million pixels. This is 10x the number of pixels as a single 1080p display.

The limit on displays isn't artificial, per se, and not so much related to pixel count, as it is to logic and memory addressing.

sillyputty1967 3 comments · 3 Years

Howdy, where is it documented that the Thunderbolt ports on Apple Silicon Macs support DisplayPort 2.0?

tenthousandthings 1060 comments · 17 Years

sillyputty1967 said:

Howdy, where is it documented that the Thunderbolt ports on Apple Silicon Macs support DisplayPort 2.0?

My understanding is that support for the USB 4 spec requires it. So when Apple says the M1 Macs support “Thunderbolt / USB 4” it means they support DisplayPort 2.0.

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

sillyputty1967 said:

Howdy, where is it documented that the Thunderbolt ports on Apple Silicon Macs support DisplayPort 2.0?

https://vesa.org/featured-articles/vesa-releases-updated-displayport-alt-mode-spec-to-bring-displayport-2-0-performance-to-usb4-and-new-usb-type-c-devices/