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by CalRobert 842 days ago
I still miss DVI.
6 comments

I don't miss it, DisplayPort is a really good replacement.
It is. And this is the likely to be the solution to this issue. DP is a VESA standard, and its Dual Mode feature supports passive adaptors for, among other things, HDMI displays. I use one on my 20-series RTX card.

A cheap DP-HDMI dongle makes all this go away. As long as VESA doesn't behave the same way, anyway.

That works somewhat well for 1080p but all adapters I have seen max out at 30fps for 4K video. Might be ok for movies but gamers might not like it.

55" monitors with DisplayPort do exist but they are only a selected few and seem to cost 4 times the price of a 4K TV.

So 4K is still pretty much a luxury that I will just ignore for now.

> A cheap DP-HDMI dongle makes all this go away. As long as VESA doesn't behave the same way, anyway.

You can even get cables that are DP on the input and HDMI on the output with minimal bulk.

But this feature works by transmitting HDMI signals so you still need to implement the software part in question.
No, it doesn’t. Hdmi alt mode doesn’t exist in the real world.
I think the connector good be better in terms of reversibility and none of that weird locking it has but it's an incredible technical achievement. And it seems perpetually ahead of HDMI in terms of features and Bandwidth.
> And it seems perpetually ahead of HDMI in terms of features and Bandwidth.

Not for the past few years. Although DP 2.0 has been 'released', there are no products actually shipping with it, and in practice DP 1.4 is the latest standard. DP 1.4 can't transmit 3840×2160 at 4:4:4 144 Hz without Display Stream Compression (DSC). HDMI 2.0 can.

> Although DP 2.0 has been 'released', there are no products actually shipping with it

Here's a GPU with DisplayPort 2.1 https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/16GB-Sapphire-Ra...

Here's a Display with DisplayPort 2.1 and higher Resolution&Refresh Rate than you specified https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/57Zoll--144-78cm...

That monitor was released not three months ago; I was describing the 99.99999% case. DP 2.0 is rare enough that an article[1] was produced this year about its scarcity.

[1]: https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/when-is-displayport-2-1-go...

Is there a point for a monitor to use DP 2.0 when the only formats it can display are all supported by 1.4?
And there is DP-Alt for USB Type-C, which makes it much nicer than a regular DP connector.
Locking is a feature, not a bug
Especially when your monitor falls down from your desk instead of simply disconnecting at the plug.
Easily solved by proper cable management.
Locking in general yes, the specific implementation of locks on the DP Plug are annoying.
It was all about SCART, which is probably the only port worse than USB for having to rotate the connector several times before getting the correct orientation to insert it
I don't miss all the variants of DVI. DVI-D, DVI-I, DVI-A, single-link, dual-link. But people would just see the cable and think, "ah, I know this, it's a DVI cable"
I've decided to skip 4K for now (at least a decade), switching to the 2560x1440 resolution (finally switched from 1200p)

I normally run it on 120Hz over DP, but it will work fine over HDMI 1.1 at 60Hz. My (5+ years old) TV runs at 1080p/120Hz just fine too.

The connector (resp Port) was too chunky for laptops and you didnt get sound over dvi, but other than that it worked just Fine each and every time. Never had issues upgrading stuff from VGA to DVI in an industrial Environment back then.
Apple had a full-size DVI connector on their PowerBook G4 series of laptops.
All the G4 PowerBooks I remember used mini-DVI?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DVI

Which is cool, but not quite as cool as micro-DVI, which they used for exactly one MacBook Air generation before mini-DisplayPort arrived on the scene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-DVI

Edit: you are right though. I just pulled up pictures on early G4 variants, and there is indeed full-size DVI. I completely forgot that.

I actually like not having sound in the same cable, it has generally made life more complicated. But my use case could be different from others.

Even DVI had HDCP though, so it too was flawed :-( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

DisplayPort has been good to me