Retina iMacs and Apple Displays Within Reach as New DisplayPort 1.3 Spec Finalized

imac_27_angleWith Dell having announced its upcoming 5120 x 2880 "5K" display that would be the equivalent of a Retina 27-inch iMac or Apple Thunderbolt Display and Apple rumored to be launching its own such display later this year, connectivity options for such displays have now taken a significant step forward with today's official release of the DisplayPort 1.3 specification by the Video Electronics Standards Association (via 9to5Mac).

The new standard offers a 50 percent increase in bandwidth to 32.4 Gbps, or 25.92 Gbps of uncompressed video data once overhead is accounted for.

The increased bandwidth enables higher resolution monitors, including recently announced 5K monitors (with pixel resolutions of 5120 x 2880) using a single DisplayPort cable, without the use of compression. It will also enable higher resolutions when driving multiple monitors through a single connection using DisplayPort’s Multi-Stream feature, such as the use of two 4K UHD monitors, each with a pixel resolution of 3840 x 2160, when using VESA Coordinated Video Timing.

Apple has been rumored for some time to be working on Retina iMacs and displays, but connectivity bottlenecks have been one of the factors slowing progress in that area.

The previous DisplayPort 1.2a standard offered enough bandwidth to support 4K displays without compression, but pushing resolutions to 5K has presented difficulties for connectivity. With the new DisplayPort 1.3 standard, which will presumably be built into future Thunderbolt implementations, computer manufacturers such as Apple will be able to fully support the new high-resolution displays set to hit the market in the coming months.

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Top Rated Comments

chfilm Avatar
141 months ago
If Apple forces me to buy a new mac Pro, just a year after purchasing the first machine for 8000 € to be able to drive such a display I will go nuts. They HAVE to figure out a way to drive this on the current machine.
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Solomani Avatar
141 months ago
Retina iMac! My precioussssss comes here my precioussss! Comes alreadiess!
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Ted13 Avatar
141 months ago
If Apple forces me to buy a new mac Pro, just a year after purchasing the first machine for 8000 € to be able to drive such a display I will go nuts. They HAVE to figure out a way to drive this on the current machine.
Prepare to go nuts, I think. The height of the irony is that I will be able to buy Display Port 1.3 card for my 2009 Mac Pro...Apple abandoning the cheese grater form factor made for great TV, and provided a machine for buyers who wanted a work of art or a a whisper quiet machine, but all of us who wanted the old workhorse updated mourn.

If only I had bought the dual CPU version back in 2009: little did i know. It is so amazing -- my boot disk is a super fast PCIe flash card, I have 16TB of internal hd space, soon to be upgraded to 24TB now that the 6TB drives are out. I have room for a couple of more 1TB PCIe flash drives -- and I can upgrade the video card whenever I want.

All Apple had to do was release a Thunderbolt capable cheese grater...
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ImSoSad Avatar
141 months ago
where's my retina iPod classic
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chirpie Avatar
141 months ago
It should have been as simple as going to the iTunes store and clicking on a button to download the new album for free instead of pushing it out to everyone.
(Hands Harry a map...)

This way my good man!

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1779357

;-)
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SilianRail Avatar
141 months ago
90% of monitors I see in the wild are still using VGA!
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)