The TL;DR is that the organization that controls the HDMI standard won’t allow any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1.
So the hardware is fully capable of it, but they’ll get in trouble if them officially implement it.
Instead it’s officially HDMI 2 (which maxes out at 4k @ 60Hz), but through a technique called chroma sub-sampling they’ve been able to raise that up to 4k @ 120Hz.
However there are some minor reductions in picture quality because of this, and the whole thing would be much easier if the HDMI forum would be more consumer friendly.
In the meantime, the Steam Machine also has display port as a completely issue free display option.
governments should start cracking down on codecs. tf are dipshits allowed to hold standards hostage?
They really just need to demand that open formats are implemented in parallel with any proprietary ones, with no artificial feature/performance disparity allowed.
That kills any incentive to keep the proprietary ones locked down because eventually the open formats will be available throughout the ecosystem and users will have devices with support in the entire pipeline. Then users will simply no longer want to deal with the locked down formats for long and nobody will want to sell them.
Proprietary formats should be illegal. Consumers are idiots, marketing will convince them to support proprietary, and regulatory capture will compromise any attempt to stop disparity
It pisses me off that you gotta pay so much money to look at the official ISO 8601.
Dated joke