2/ Valve recently confirmed to Ars that the "At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements." aspect is the reason why Valve's New Steam Machine officially only supports #HDMI 2.0; but they are trying to help improve things there:
""This situation has caused significant headaches for Valve, which tells Ars it has had to validate the Steam Machine’s HDMI 2.1 hardware via Windows during testing. And when it comes to HDMI performance via SteamOS, a Valve representative tells Ars that “we’ve been working on trying to unblock things there.”
That includes unblocking HDMI 2.0’s resolution and frame-rate limits […]"
"Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues."
Hardly *driver* issues. 🧐
@hrw I'm more in the "if only we had laws to prevent situations like this" camp.
»DisplayPort 1.4 output, which supports even more bandwidth than HDMI 2.1 (and which can be converted to an HDMI signal with a simple dongle)« - does that impede any HDMI 2.1 features? If not, why have an HDMI port at all, why not include such a dongle instead?
@wonka see the replies to the post that started the thread. In short: TVs have HDMI and no DP – and this a machine that will often be connected to TVs.
Further: dongles/onboard converters can solve the problem, but they cost money (and might require a special design in case Valve used a mainboard that is used in other machines, too)
@kernellogger @Sobex Just add cheap arse chinese dp to hdmi (usb-c2hdmi) adapter alongside :D