Ivy Bridge GPU to support 4K resolutions

Intel’s new Ivy Bridge GPUs are starting to look like quite an impressive package. First, came the news of Direct X 11 compliance and then we had the news that the best Ivy Bridge GPU would by 66% faster than any integrated Sandy Bridge GPU. Now Intel tells us Ivy Bridge will natively support 4K resolutions. With a maximum support of up to 4096 by 4096, a huge resolution by any standards and a lot more than the 2560 by 1600 that Sandy Bridge GPUs could handle. The Ivy Bridge MFX or Multi format codec engine will be able to play and decode multiple 4K video streams at the same time. The 4K QuadHD resolution will be supported, which is 3840 by 2160 which has 4 times as many pixels as a standard 1080p monitor. So monitors which were in fashion for a brief period of time back in 2010, such as the 4K QuadHD monitors which the Nvidia CEO labelled XHD2, will be able to come back into production and possibly buck the current trend of having multiple monitors to access the highest resolutions. Although the Ivy Bridge GPU won’t be able to sustain gaming at these resolutions it is still a big leap forward for the standard of Intel Integrated graphics and most home users will be happy with the new step up in performance which is raising the bar in image quality.

However, it has been pointed out by Anandtech that currently the display output with the highest bandwidth is display port 1.2 which supports up to 21.6GB/s whilst to achieve a 4096 by 4096 resolution it would require about 36gb/s with 24 bit colour and a 60Hz refresh rate so achieving these resolutions in the near future isn’t that realistic.

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