Rob Jamieson takes a closer look at two new display technologies and their potential impact on the design sector.

As new technology arrives there is always an initial resistance from people who invested in the old technology and don't want to think that their investment is wasted. An example of this is the move from AGP to PCI-Express - although now everybody is happy with PCI-Express as it has become the de facto standard.

Today we are on the cusp of some new changes in the graphics industry in the form of two separate technologies combining to form a new standard. These are known as Display Port and 10-bit 'consumer' panels - consumer meaning affordable to the general audience as opposed to the high-end panels used in special disciplines.

Display Port

Display Port is a new form of interconnect between the graphics card and the display. It is a smaller thinner cable than DVI or VGA and, in its basic form, can be three metres long (likely to support more length in time) with the ability to drive monitors up to 9 megapixels i.e. resolutions of 2,560 x 1,600. As it's a digital interface it does not suffer from the analogue interference associated with VGA plus there is the option of chaining monitors together using one cable, allowing more data to be transferred. To get high resolution support today you need a dual link cable where all of the pins are used to send data down a DVI. Besides the aforementioned advantages, its small connection is very useful for laptops where space is limited. There is no reason why a laptop will not have a VGA port in the near future but expect them to be fazed out as more projectors are built with digital inputs.

Display Ports can also have a converter attached to plug into DVI/ However as it's purely digital it's harder to get a Display Port to VGA, which is why most DVI carries an analogue signal as well.

Major OEMs have announced support for Display Port monitors including Dell, which has one on its range today. The more interconnects you put on the monitor the more that the cost increases, so it's likely that if Display Port becomes popular it will end up being the only fitting on a monitor.

10-bit panels

10-bit support, which allows access to more colours, has been around for a while. However, the cost of monitors has meant a slow adoption of the technology. Nonetheless it is important. Colour depth is the graduation between different colours so, for example, if you take a greyscale colour transition bar on a cheap laptop screen you can see banding where you may expect a smoother blend. This is because a lot of the cheaper laptop displays are only 6-bit, and where the graphics card may be sending 8-bit colour, the screen is only interpreting 6-bit. 10-bit displays, on the other hand, not only lessen banding but allow a greater range of transitions, meaning that you can see the difference between light and dark in greater contrast.

But what does this mean to the average CAD user? Well if your only interest is plugging a blue part into a red one without consideration for how the final design will look, then not much. However if aesthetics and colour are important then it will make a difference. Car body designers for instance are prime examples of people who will benefit from a closer representation of colour.

Some of the classical areas that will see great benefits and promote the use of 10-bit technology are in medicine where the slightest colour variation could indicate the presence of a tumour. However, areas such as photography, where it is possible to remove the dark circles from a model who has been out late the night before, is how this technology will be pushed into the mainstream. Colourists who match different TV and movie scenes shot at different times by using gentle changes in the colour temperature will also benefit from 10-bit technology, as will oil and gas companies that create massive simulations of the earth's strata to find the elusive precious minerals needed for that industry.

Although graphic cards that support 10-bit have been around for a few years, there is a big difference between cards that can display 10-bit in 2D mode and those that can provide 3D performance and 10-bit on both outputs at the same time. Luckily for me the ATI FireGL range does this, as does the previous generation of cards.

So why aren't we using 10-bit now? The answer is that it still needs some software support that is already available in the specialist areas but that is not quite ready for mainstream consumers. 10-bit screens have also been viewed to be expensive; however there are rumours of a shift in price of monitors soon which will make more accessible to a wider audience speeding up the adoption process.

Robert Jamieson works for the hardware manufacturer AMD. The opinions in the article are not necessary the opinions of AMD as a company.