 We're here excited to showcase the latest and greatest with the HDMI 2.1 specification. Behind me here, we have an 8K TV, CES 2019 is all about 8K. The first products have been announced, have come to market from Samsung, from LG, Sony, TCL, Kanga have all announced their 8K products. Behind me here, we're showing a demonstration from a chip company called Invicus. We're showing off the full 48 gigabit bandwidth for HDMI 2.1. It will be through one of those cables. And this here is one of the prototypes of an HDMI ultra high-speed HDMI cable that will be used to support the full 48 gigabits. These will be coming to market soon once the compliance test specification is available. So every tech news site is saying that the big story of CES 2019 is 8K. And every time they talk about 8K, it's always HDMI 2.1, right? Yeah, so every time you see an 8K announcement, there will be a 2.1 port on those products because that's the only way to get the 8K video from a source to a display. So look for more and more announcements from the TV manufacturers as the year rolls on. All right. And there's some other products that are on the market that have 2.1, right? Yeah, absolutely. So let's come on over here. We'll walk across the booth here. We're over here. We're going to see the Microsoft Xbox One X. This is one of the first products to introduce itself with 2.1 features, specifically the variable rate refresh and the auto-load late C mode. So I want to hand you off to Norm from Microsoft here. We'll tell you more about the Xbox One X. All right. Thanks. So hi. So hi. So who are you? I'm Norm. I'm from the Xbox team at Microsoft. Yeah. And so you have successfully been able to implement these 2.1 features in their shipping, right? Yes. Since the last time we talked at 2018 CES, we have the Xbox One X here, along with the Xbox One S that have turned on some of the gaming features, specifically HDMI VRR and auto-load latency mode. At the same time, we have Samsung who has also turned on those features. So in this implementation, we're currently demonstrating at CES 2019, HDMI VRR and auto-load latency mode two of the four gaming features actually working today. So this is an actual popular Samsung 4K TV HDR. Yes. They updated the firmware. Exactly. This is a 2018 model and they have several models that do support these features. In addition, these are both completely retail units. They're not custom. They don't have demo software work working on them. And what's the feeling for gamer, the difference? How does it feel different? Well, there's two things that happen and both of these features operate differently. Turning on ALLM tells the TV to go into game mode, which makes the entire experience feel more reactive. So everything happens much quicker. On the other hand, VRR, because it allows the GPU to take more time to render the frames, makes the action seem smoother. And so we're demonstrating that with several games here this year, which there are YouTube videos that actually show multiple games and how VRR actually improves the experience. It seems smoother. Is it like what Nvidia and AMD are doing with G-Sync, Pre-Sync? It's the exact same experience leveling. So you get the same feeling of smoothness that you do. So this is G-Sync and Pre-Sync technology capabilities, experience on HDMI. And it's a standard feature that all HDMI adopters can put into their products. And what kind of work did you have to do and what kind of testing did you have to do to make that work with the Xbox? Well, fortunately, Microsoft was responsible, along with AMD, of getting these technologies into the HDMI 2.1 specification. So we had a real good idea of what needed to be done. And we're also responsible for writing the tests that will make everything certified as compliant. So we're certain this box is working as the rest of the ecosystem needs to work. And so as manufacturers add these technologies to their devices, they can use the Xbox as a reference platform today in order to help ensure that their products are going to be compliant. Now, full certification testing is going to be required to make that claim. But today, we want to make sure that with this one device that's out in the market, they can make sure that their devices work correctly with our system. And I want to get any secrets out of you, right? But it can't do 8K, right? It can't get 8K. So the gaming features are kind of orthogonal to resolution. So you can do VRR at 1080p or 720p or 4K. All right. So that means the hardware that was built and when was it released in 2016? So the Xbox One X was released in 2017. The Xbox One S was released the year before. Both of them are with a combination of AMD and Microsoft SoC inside. And since the AMD Silicon supports FreeSync, it's really a small leap for a software upgrade to make it HMI VRR capable. And so we were very lucky in our choice of Silicon provider that we could turn on these technologies very, very quickly. It was future proof. It was like, you know. We were very fortunate that it was future proof, yes. And it's become basically, this is the reference that people should know. Yes, this is the first source device that has both ALLM and HMI VRR. And you're pushing the industry to do every TV to support this? We're working with all TV vendors and a lot of the repeaters that go in between such as soundbars and AVRs and preamps in order to allow these signaling to go through. Typically those devices are really concerned about audio. But in order for this signaling to get to the TV, we encourage those repeater devices to incorporate that technology. All right. Now we also talked to the TV manufacturers and there have been several introductions, press announcements this year about the inclusion of HMI VRR. So here you have the remote, right? So when you push something, what is the milliseconds? Is there some way to measure that? What's the latency actually? So there is a way to measure it. You can't do it on screen. So essentially what happens is you have to measure the signal that comes in and then time how long it takes for something on the screen to change. So there are test equipment devices that actually determine how long the latency is. And there are websites that do that kind of testing for you. And how much is the HDMI 2.1 spec helping with that compared to the actual TV manufacturer creating a low latency TV? It's actually not. So most TVs today include several video processing modes, such as for sports. So you kind of reduce some of the blur cinema, which is really good for video processing. And then the game mode, which reduces as much of the long latency processing as possible. What ALLM does is it allows the source device to tell the display when to go into game mode and then when to revert back. So a common use case is since we have OTT streaming inside this box, you set your TV up to a cinema mode so that when you're watching Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, any of the streaming apps, it will process the video the best way it can. But when we watch a game like Wolfenstein that you see here, it will tell the display, please go into game mode. And then all of that long video processing gets reduced. And then when you exit the game, go back into the dashboard, then it will tell it to please go back to whatever mode you had before. So it allows the source to tell the display when to change and the user no longer has to go in and do it manually. So what's happening is actually the Xbox is encoding the video, the TV is decoding the video and when you decode you wanna, there's different ways to decode, you can decode higher quality or lower quality but you just wanted the fastest one. So there's no encoding and decoding going on. So all of it's being rendered here in the box but we're telling the TV what kind of processing it does. When you do processing for video, there's a lot of things you can do. There's motion interpolation, there's compensation, there's mapping, tone mapping you can do that you don't need to do for games. For games you really wanna reduce that 50 to 100 millisecond of video processing down to the low teens. So pro gamers are gonna use pro monitor gaming and stuff like that. It's still gonna be faster than even those kind of TVs or is it possible that TVs are gonna be as fast as the coolest gaming monitors, you know? There are several TVs that are trying to reduce that latency down into the teens but you will find professional gaming monitors that are down below 10 milliseconds. Now that can be really hard to do but that's kind of the asymptote that a lot of TVs which are supporting game mode are working towards. How did they reach that? What's the challenge for them to get there? That's technology. That's technology. That's technology and they're all using their own special sauce in order to speed up the chips that are doing the processing and just being clever. All right, but this is true size in the 18 model. It's gonna, it's exciting to see the CS. There's so many new TVs and stuff to size 19. It's gonna get better and better, right? Yes. The experience for the gamers is gonna be better and better. Exactly, exactly. So in addition to what we've got turned on today, there's additional features. Quick frame transport is also gonna help reduce the overall latency, the overall reactivity of the system by decreasing the amount of time it takes to transmit the data from the source to the display whereas low latency mode reduces the processing time in the display and that's all part of the entire cycle. So HDR is one of the coolest things about the TV industry. Isn't a console and games the perfect thing to do in HDR? We have done and when we introduced the Xbox One S three years ago, we were the first box that enabled HDR gaming and the games that actually have HDR continue to grow and grow as the market becomes, you know, more capable. It becomes more impressive, right? It does. It's very nice to play HDR. Yes, you have those specular highlights, very bright spots on the screen in addition to nice deep blacks. And there's also a bunch of stuff that's done with that in HDMI 2.1, right? Actually HDR came out in several years ago with HDMI 2.0. So with HDMI 2.1, there is dynamic HDR, which is a new capability. You can change the HDR settings on the fly, but that's more for video and not necessarily for gaming. Gaming, we're very free to change whatever the HDR settings are, whatever we want to. Cool. All right. I hope people don't play too much on these games, right? Because they need to, in society, people need to do work also, right? I'm joking. Like, this is one of the greatest pastimes. This is my work. This is my work. This is one of the greatest pastimes. And it's not so expensive. When you go buy a game, they can be playing the game for 80 hours, 100 hours. It's actually the price per hour. Yes, there are many gamers who will start on a low difficulty level just to get used to it and get practice in. And then as you say, they will take it up to the next level and the next level.