Valve tells Ars its "trying to unblock" limits caused by open source driver issues.

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.

  • Buddahriffic
    2·
    3 months ago

    Might be an issue with your cable, so don’t rule that out. There’s a lot of cheap ones out there that either don’t quite meet the specs or just barely did but any amount of degredation has brought them a bit under, resulting in a longer time to establish a link. High res and refresh rates take a surprising amount of bandwidth.