The short answer is HDMI was mainly developed by a consortium of Stereo and Television manufacturers whereas DisplayPort was firmly always developed as a modern replacement for VGA.
Somehow, I trust the people in the computer industry to make better and more strict standards than I expect from the audio/visual industry. There’s a lot more advertising fluff from those groups while PC stuff can generally be nailed down by checking benchmarks against each other. How would you even benchmark two different stereo systems? (If I’m wrong and there is a way to benchmark them, cool, please share!)
Anyway, yeah, HDMI was for “Home Theaters” and pushed by the industry that builds that kind of thing and DisplayPort is for computers, period.
I used to think DisplayPort was the future, about 10-13 years ago.
By now I feel it has come and gone.
HDMI 2.1+ is making its way in everywhere.
- It’s a better plug.
- It tends to support enough pixels/Hz for most people.
- It’s more ubiquitous, being on both TV’s laptops, and monitors.
Pretty sure the PC desktop segment will keep the port alive for a while, but right now it doesn’t seem like a very useful port apart from having a plug that claws itself in place and is often unnecessarily hard to unplug.
With Ultra High Speed HDMI (these names are ridiculous, seriously, look at the standard names) there’s very few, if any, reasons to use DP, apart from compliant HDMI cables costing an arm and a leg.
To be honest I’m struggling a bit to understand why it’s not just all pushed through a CAT6/7 Ethernet cable at this point.
DisplayPort is a better system than HDMI. It even can ride piggy back on USB-C, which means a display can both power a computer on the same line as it connects to a laptop with. DisplayPort also supports daisy chaining(although it’s not a common feature on monitors), so you could potentially have a single USB-C cable going to a laptop and then have multiple monitors connected with needing a dock or anything of that sort.