what is this displayport and what will become of it?

[BlahBlahYouToo]

keep reading that it will replace DVI/HDMI but i've seen nothing that really uses it yet.
is this vaporware?

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I've seen a few products and there are cables and video converter cables for it already.
http://www.displayport.org/

 

[s44]

It's a no-license-fee HDMI alternative. Apple is pushing it. Given the convergence of the monitor and HDTV spaces, I doubt it'll have much impact on this generation of resolutions...

Also, the spec has 1/6 the audio bandwidth of HDMI and no bitstreaming, making it useless for Blu-Ray etc.

 

[Modelworks]

Think of display port as plug and play for video. The way video works now with HDMI when you plug in a device on a pc you might still have to tell the display what type of device you plugged in, what its features are and what resolutions it can display. Display port replaces that with a single connector that is connected to a circuit that can determine what you plugged into it and what the capabilities are. So imagine you have a display port connector on your video card. If you connect a monitor, it instantly knows what that monitor supports, the monitors size , native resolution, etc. Plug in a projector and it knows all about its capabilities as well. Want to output on a tv, it knows you connected one and what its format is, on one connector without any need to input settings from the user.

The other thing that will apply to new monitors is direct drive. Right now monitors have a chipset that connects to the cable coming from the video card. That chipset processes the video, scaling, etc into a format the LCD panel driver chip can understand. Direct drive removes that first chip. Now the video card/device is directly connected to the panel, it controls all scaling, color and output. The display becomes just a display without any processing being done.

It is not intended to replace HDMI. It is targeted at the computer market where people need to connect lots of different devices that use different formats.