I am looking for the ABSOLUTE best HDMI signal that I can get out of my Framework 13:
I went on a two day ‘crusade’ to find out that the HDMI expansion card has only HDMI 2.0 capabilities.
I’m looking for 4K@120Hz and VRR and ALL THE THINGS!
Two questions:
What is the absolute maximum I can get out of my laptop?
Would this cable do it? ( 8K USB-C to HDMI 2.1 Adapter With HDCP2.3)
With kind regards!!
Peter
At this stage, you might as well future proof your purchase…
For example, why stop at 4k@120Hz when you can have 4k@240Hz (the adapter)…
I don’t know why I looked everything up, but my cable suggestion is better then yours:
But what I REALLY want to know, what is this cable comptible with my framework AND what is the maximum available?
With kind regards!
You’re right. The CM dongle sucks.
Maximum ‘what’ are you looking for, resolution, framerate, bitrate…?
Maybe look at the Graphics Capabilities section:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/7000-series/amd-ryzen-5-7640u.html
As always, resolution and Hz is entirely irrelevant to this.
The laptop has no HDMI outputs. It has DP outputs and active adapters may be able to convert this to HDMI. How successfull this works for specific features and monitors and GPUs (and their drivers) is varies greatly.
Depending on the port and generation of your laptop the DP speeds supported are different.
At the very least its HBR3. For the Phoenix AMD board, it might be that the no-USB4 DP Alt mode output supports UHBR10 speeds as well, Frameworks specs are woefully unclear for any of this (the CPU itself supports UHBR10 on every DP output, but the mainboard definitely does not for the USB4 ports, unclear for the rest. The chips used would support it, but if Framework did not test it, they might still justifiably have disabled it in firmware to prevent issues. The new Strix Point AMD board for example should support UHBR10 on every board, but I also think this has not been officially confirmed. While the Intel Ultra 100 board should support UHBR10 and UHBR20 on every port)
All currently available DP HDMI adapters are limited to HBR3 speeds anyway. So the max. bandwidth that they can get from any source is ~25.9 Gbit/s. The current max usable bandwidth of an FRL 6 connection would be 42.6 Gbit/s. While the current crop of adapters can output at max bandwidth, that would be done by using higher compression from the GPU and the adapter decompressing. Which basically no sane HDMI monitor would do / need.
UHBR10 DP connections with 38.8 Gbit/s of usable bandwidth would solve for most of that with future DP-HDMI adapters.
VRR is a problem. Synaptics announced a DP-HDMI converter chip that can translate DP Adaptive Sync to HDMI VRR, but hard to know which adapter uses it and actually can do it.
There have been documented cases of people using one specific Cablematters adapter (fullsize DP) with AMD dGPUs under Linux and have HDMI VRR support (even though the Cablematters product description says it does not have it. There also seem to be 2 variants of that adapter, one with an old chip without it and the new one with it).
But I have basically the USB-C variant of that adapter (same chip - VMM7100) and it does not seem to support it in practice (either on Intel Xe iGPUs nor on an AMD Strix Point iGPU. But also the only monitor with HDMI VRR I have is using HDMI VRR without FRL, which seems rare at best. Intel’s sparse documentation for example says, that they do not support this combination on a driver level at all even with native ports. AMD Strix Point supports HDMI VRR with this monitor via native HDMI port, but does not detect VRR support with said DP-HDMI adapter).
So, you require practical proof of somebody else using a very specific adapter to get HDMI VRR with a specific type of monitor to be sure, as almost no manufacturer of such adapters is currently advertising it (because the software / GPU driver and monitor supports seems spotty at best, they probably don’t dare to advertise it, because there are too many variables to be sure. Many people cannot even distinguish between FreeSync HDMI and HDMI VRR, and only the latter would ever be supported by such an adapter, as the former is proprietary garbage).
Best to just avoid HDMI as much as possible and just stick to DP where this is a lot less of a problem.
I understand everything completely BUT my LG OLED tv says no DP.
Like I said, you either will not get VRR (not sure about ALLM, have not looked into that / don’t care, its a TV-specific hack), need to find adapters that have successfully worked for others or be prepared to try a whole bunch of adapters to find one that maybe works.
Synaptics VMM7100 is the chip of which we know that its supposed to support VRR.
Here is a list of Cablematters adapters (for which they all state they don’t support VRR)
All that can be updated with the hack to support 4K120 on Apple Systems use the VMM7100 chipset.
I have the foldable one (201398) which does not work for AMD Strix Point on newest drivers (25.5.1) and my non-FRL, but HDMI VRR monitor. And 102101 is the one that had successful reports from AMD RX 7000 GPUs with FRL+HDMI VRR TVs under Linux (but careful, there is an old variant of this sold under the same name that used an older chipset that did not support VRR).
I also heard of a dock for Steam-Deck a while back that was explicitly advertised to support HDMI VRR and one reddit user that confirmed. But never found out what chipset was driving that.
Good luck and share which are confirmed to work (on which firmware, with which drivers and exact monitor model and ideally EDID dump) and which won’t.
