Technically, the Steam Machine supports HDMI 2.1. However, Valve and AMD are not allowed to offer an open-source driver for it.

The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve’s Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations.

  • Buelldozer@lemmy.todayEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    But why does the HDMI forum not want a open source 2.1-compliant implementation?

    To my knowledge they’ve never officially said but you can be sure that it has to do with Content Protection and that means DRM. An Open Source HDMI 2.1+ driver would make pirating much simpler, probably trivial and they don’t want that.

    It’s possible anyway of course but there are a couple of hardware hoops to jump through and that’s enough to keep most people from doing it.