Intel Announces Ivy Bridge Processors Will Support 4K Resolution Displays This Year

Intel looks like they are encouraging the PC industry to move towards ultra-high resolution (UHD) displays at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) this year in San Francisco. WE were able to see a demonstration yesterday where Intel is showing off the current generation of Ivy Bridge processors with 4K resolution! Intel informed is that they will be releasing a graphics driver update for 3rd generation Core processors (Ivy Bridge) in October that will enable 4K x 2K resolution support.

We were shown a demo unit (pictured above) that was playing Ultra HD 4K video content with hardware accelerated 4K video decode capabilities enabled. This resulted in around 25-45% CPU use according to Windows Task Manager.

The bad news is that you need two DisplayPorts on the motherboard to drive a 4K panel with an Ivy Bridge system. We learned this when Ivy Bridge first came out and Intel touted triple-monitor support with integrated Intel HD 4000 Graphics. No motherboard had two DisplayPorts on it back then and very few do today. So, this means that most if not all of the current Ivy Bridge systems are not capable of using 4K display. The good news is that the upcoming Intel Haswell based processors will support 4K through a single DP output or a normal HDMI connector and the CPU usage will also be less!