2 ms·

> Funny, a stream of data at a constant rate makes much more sense to me intuitively than packets, specifically for uncompressed video. Sure, until you start t

> Funny, a stream of data at a constant rate makes much more sense to me intuitively than packets, specifically for uncompressed video. Sure, until you start trying to design the transceivers and realize that supporting two or three fixed standard data rates is a lot simpler than supporting a continuously-variable clock speed. Every other high-speed digital interface operates at just a few discrete speeds: SATA/SAS, PCIe, Ethernet, USB. The fact that DVI and HDMI were such a shallow digitization of VGA's racing-the-beam meant features like variable refresh rate (Gsync/Freesync) showed up far later than they should have. If we hadn't wasted a decade using CRT timings (and slight modifications thereof) to drive LCDs over digital links, it would have been more obvious that the link between GPU and display should be negotiated to the fastest data rate supported by both endpoints rather than the lowest data rate sufficient to deliver the pixels.

ansible 3y ago
> ... If we hadn't wasted a decade using CRT timings (and slight modifications thereof) to drive LCDs over digital links ... Don't forget the decade or so (late 1990's to early 2000's) where we were driving LCDs over analog links (VGA connectors). I had purchased a pair of Silicon Graphics 1600SW monitors back in the day, which required a custom Number Nine graphics card with an OpenLDI display interface. It was many years since those were introduced to the market that DVI finally started becoming commonplace on PC graphics cards. Using the mass-market LCD monitors in the late 1990's was a frustrating affair, where you had to manually adjust the timing synchronization of the analog signal.