Which Cable Can Actually Carry Your Monitor

A monitor's pixel clock is width × height × refresh rate. Each pixel carries three colour channels, so 24 bits at 8 bits per channel or 30 bits at 10. And the transmitted frame is bigger than the visible one: CTA-861 timing for 4K60 is 4,400 × 2,250 against an active area of 3,840 × 2,160, which is where the 1.19 to 1.20 overhead factor comes from.

So 4K at 144 Hz and 10 bits per channel needs 3840 × 2160 × 144 × 30 × 1.20, which is 43 Gbps — more than HDMI 2.1's 42.67 and well past DisplayPort 1.4's 25.92. That monitor exists in this catalog and works fine, which tells you compression is doing real work.

Marketing quotes raw signalling rates and the useful figure is what survives line coding. HDMI 2.0 signals at 18 Gbps and delivers 14.4 after 8b/10b encoding. HDMI 2.1 signals at 48 and delivers 42.67 after 16b/18b. DisplayPort HBR3 signals at 32.4 and delivers 25.92. The UHBR tiers switched to 128b/132b, which is why UHBR20 keeps 77.37 of its 80.

Worse, "HDMI 2.1" is a version of the specification rather than a guarantee of bandwidth: a port can be labelled HDMI 2.1 while running at 24 or even 18 Gbps, because every 2.0-era capability was folded into the 2.1 specification. This is the single most common way a monitor's port disappoints, and it is why every monitor page here prints what each input can carry rather than what it is called.

Display Stream Compression is a VESA standard for visually lossless compression at up to 3:1, applied in the GPU and undone in the monitor's scaler. It is how a 4K 240 Hz monitor works over a DisplayPort 1.4 cable, and in normal viewing it is genuinely hard to fault.

Two practical consequences, though. DSC occupies the GPU's display pipeline in a way that historically broke some multi-monitor arrangements and delayed mode changes, so a blank screen when alt-tabbing is a known DSC symptom. And it is not universal: a monitor without DSC has no way to exceed its port, so it runs at 8 bits per channel instead. A small number of monitors in this catalog cannot reach their advertised refresh rate at 10 bits over any input they have, which is the kind of thing a specification sheet expresses by simply not mentioning bit depth.

A PlayStation or an Xbox has HDMI and nothing else. A monitor whose fast input is DisplayPort and whose HDMI is 2.0 is a perfectly good PC monitor and a 4K60 console monitor, whatever the box says about 144 Hz — and monitors in exactly that configuration are common, because HDMI 2.1 silicon costs more than DisplayPort 1.4 silicon.

This is checkable rather than a matter of opinion, so every monitor page here runs the arithmetic per input and says which of them reaches the panel's maximum. Two-thirds of this catalog passes; the third that does not is worth knowing about before the console is plugged in.