Hiya!
This is probably more simple than what I’m making into, but I want to be sure, so here we go:
Currently in the market for a good HDMI cable, however, I am curious as to what I need to know (as I know nothing about these cables) before buying one. So my use case for this scenario is a 3M long HDMI cable that will connect my desktop(Nobara or Bazzite) to my TV (that has Nvidia Shield). This is for easy access to couch gaming. My desktop has a RX 6700 XT card, but unsure about the specifications of the TV other than it being a 70inch one (can try to find this if its relevant), but I am not looking to stream 4k. So let me know what kinda specs/details i need to look for in a HDMI cable for this :)))
PS. I tried setting up Sunlight + Moonlight, but honestly seemed like a bit too much configuration for my liking, but might give it a go again later on. I’ve also only got access to medium-speed Wifi atm, so this isn’t optional.
Take a look at HDMI versions in wikipedia and select cable accordingly.
Don’t go with “cheapest” advices as you might buy cable that only capable to FullHD@30Hz, which I think not what you want.
Also, if your card and TV have displayport I’ll suggest to go with that instead of HDMI. It just better and does not forbid open source realisations, like HDMI consortium does on HDMI 2.1.
Would you mind expanding on the open source realisations thing? I’m trying to get more into open source software but I’m a little too tech illiterate to understand the nuances, including what you just mentioned.
HDMI has a private company that owns the rights to it. They get to decide if you get to call yourself HDMI and they can sue you if you lie about it. They decide what new features HDMI implements. This is a proprietary standard. As a recent example, AMD wrote an open source driver for HDMI 2.1 that would allow 8k on any device using an AMD graphics card. The HDMI owners basically said “no, you can’t distribute this, shut the project down and write something proprietary.” This doesn’t help the consumer at all, and although they didn’t explicitly say it, HDMI probably made that decision because studios pay a lot of money to make it hard to pirate over HDMI.
DisplayPort is an open standard. If you were to write the same AMD 8k driver for DisplayPort, they would say “great, we can’t stop you from using this anyways, so share as much as you like.” Open standards are better for consumers because they can improve more easily.
Just search for “amd hdmi 2.1 linux” to get full story.
In short - AMD wrote an implememtation for HDMI 2.1 standart for Linux driver, but it requires approval from HDMI consortium. They (consortium) denied it, so AMD couldn’t ship it.