Final yr, we famous how the long-standing vagaries of HDMI licensing and open supply AMD driver improvement mixed to stop the upcoming Steam Machine from receiving official help for the HDMI 2.1 show commonplace. Now, although, evidently AMD is making actual progress on including full HDMI 2.1 compliance to its Linux amdgpu driver within the close to future.
In patch collection notes for an amdgpu driver replace posted on Friday (and seen by Phoronix), AMD’s Harry Wentland says that the corporate is lastly including HDMI FRL (Fastened Price Hyperlink) help to the favored Linux show driver. That’s the characteristic that enables for larger bandwidth on appropriate HDMI cables in comparison with the TMDS commonplace discovered on HDMI 2.0 and earlier. That in flip permits direct help for larger resolutions, dynamic HDR, and options like Variable Refresh Price that aren’t supported in HDMI 2.0.
Wentland notes that this replace continues to be simply “a consultant subset of HDMI compliance,” partly as a result of it’s lacking the code to help the Show Stream Compression (DSC) that enables for even larger resolutions and body charges as much as 10K at 100 Hz. However Wentland provides that DSC help “continues to be being examined and can be despatched out later,” and that “a full compliance run” for HDMI 2.1 is “within the works.” An AMD driver developer with the deal with agd5f additionally commented on Phoronix, noting that “a full implementation [of HDMI 2.1] will in the end be out there as soon as the patches are prepared and have accomplished compliance testing.”
