[STEAM] Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.

[Steam 0]

When Valve

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, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that

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lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard

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. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”

As

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, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.

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