A Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has just announced a new DisplayPort 2.1a Standard that supports multi-resolution combinations and doubles the length of the passive cable from 1 to 2 meters.
The new DP54 cable with ultra-high bit rate (UHBR) introduces the UHBR13 specification and succeeds the DP40 specification that uses the UHBR10 standard. The new standard will be embraced by different electronics, but will be most beneficial for ultra-wide screen and multi-display configurations.
The latest DP 2.1a cable allows a UHBR13.5 link rate of four lanes to provide a data transfer rate of up to 54 Gbps on a two-meter cable. This is a breakthrough, as the UHBR13.5 specification was only possible with a restricted DP80 UHBR cable for 1 meter cables.
This change in cable length and increased bandwidth is much appreciated and just in time for next-generation monitors, TVs, graphics boards, and different types of sink (usually the monitor) and source devices for different uses.
Cable Length Compatible with DP2.0 Standard
Users with UHBR13.5 compatible hardware and cables enable higher resolution and refresh rate combinations of up to 8K2K at 240 Hz, or 8K4K at 120 Hz. The two-meter cable length of DP2.1a can be utilized by the current generation UHBR10 specification available in the DisplayPort 2.0 standard.
James Choate, VESA’s compliance program manager, said in a press statement that “with the latest DisplayPort update, the UHBR13.5 cable specification has now been developed specifically to provide UHBR10 and UHBR13.5 monitors and graphics board with a longer passive cable. Consumers are no longer limited to connecting UHBR13.5 source and sink devices with a 1-meter DP80 cable, which provides more bandwidth support than their hardware needs and, in some cases, may be too short for their configuration, for example, with ultra-wide curved screens.”
Don’t expect to see many devices taking advantage of the new cables anytime soon. The recently announced RTX 40 Super series graphics cards use DisplayPort1.4a output. The same can be said for the monitors announced during CES 2024. Sink and source devices will take a long time to adopt DisplayPort 2.1a.
VESA is ready for a distant future, but we will only see this new standard widely adopted with graphics boards beyond the RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs, which will use DisplayPort 2.0. As DP 2.0 devices can take advantage of the additional cable length, we may see this cable standard deployed during the RTX 50’s lifecycle and for high-resolution TVs in the near future.