The TL;DR is that the organization that controls the HDMI standard won’t allow any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1.
So the hardware is fully capable of it, but they’ll get in trouble if them officially implement it.
Instead it’s officially HDMI 2 (which maxes out at 4k @ 60Hz), but through a technique called chroma sub-sampling they’ve been able to raise that up to 4k @ 120Hz.
However there are some minor reductions in picture quality because of this, and the whole thing would be much easier if the HDMI forum would be more consumer friendly.
In the meantime, the Steam Machine also has display port as a completely issue free display option.
I don’t know why they’d think I’d capture 600MB/s of uncompressed video though.
Since the torrent sites are crammed with full quality 4k Bluray remuxes and WebDLs direct from Amazon, there’s clearly easier and better ways of doing this than putting encryption in a cable.
Oh, they are working on that too. Win 11 depends on TPM modules, and it’s not by mistake. Once they have the full software and hardware pipeline, they can control the media we see (for profit, but also for authoritarism because the jump is so small).
I love that you’re talking about these issues, but the TPM has nothing to do with any of this. It’s also not a hard requirement for Windows 11 (even though that’s basically all the media was talking about).