While HDMI 2.1 is making a big splash with its increasingly high performance bandwidth in TVs, monitors, and graphics cards (such as the RTX 3090), DisplayPort has been slow to roll out the new and improved DisplayPort 2.0 specification for some time. And it appears that it has been further delayed until later this year.

"Monitors supporting DisplayPort 2.0 are currently in development but have not yet been released to the market," a VESA spokesperson told The Verge.

"DisplayPort 2.0 is currently running on a new system chip and should be in products by late 2021.

VESA is responsible for the DisplayPort standard, which you may recognize from the standardized VESA mounts on the back of monitors/mini-PCs and the DisplayHDR standard. They are basically an organization tasked with standardizing all sorts of technical things, and are a bit at odds with organizations like the HDMI Forum when it comes to display connectors.

HDMI certainly dominates the TV industry. But I can rip my DisplayPort cables out of the hands of cold PC gamers.

Anyway, the latest spec, DisplayPort 2.0, finalized for 2019, will offer up to 80 Gbps (~77.37 Gbps); HDMI 2.1 has a bandwidth of 48 Gbps.

DisplayPort 1.4 is only 32.4 Gb/s. It uses Display Stream Compression (DSC), a form of near lossless encoding, to manage 4K at up to 8K 60Hz or 120Hz.

With DisplayPort 2.0, you don't have to bother with that; DisplayPort 2.0 has the bandwidth to run high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitors without compression and with adequate color depth. This bandwidth also includes 8K and 4K at high refresh rates, which is good timing now that 4K 144Hz panels are starting to appear in adequate numbers and at somewhat affordable prices.

DisplayPort 2.0 is also said to be capable of running a single 16K display at 60Hz, but for the time being the focus will be on 4K gaming. At least it's good to have aspirations. You can read more about the specifications on the VESA website.

Sadly, we will have to wait a bit longer to get DisplayPort 2.0 compatible panels. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prevented the usual testing events that would normally have been released earlier.