One of the problems facing the HDMI interface outside of PC is the so-called “bonk” effect, something very annoying that leaves a bad impression on any console, television or simply the medium that plays it. With the HDMI 2.1 output this is going to end thanks to a new technology that will use and rely on another that we all already know, VRR. This technology is called QMS and is as simple as it is effective.
Surely it has happened to you that when you were watching content on your TV using HDMI, when changing videos you saw a black or white screen, totally opaque and full screen. Well this is what QMS is going to avoid, the so-called bonk effect by which the screen has to interpolate an image in the middle in order to change the frequency of the different contents.
QMS will reach any content visible on the screen
Quick Media Switching or QMS, for its acronym in English, uses VRR technology to eliminate these annoying screens when I cough the devices in the connection chain to the HDMI switch video mode.
That is, if we have different videos consecutively and these are being offered in different hertz, without QMS what we would see is the named bonk between content and content. Thanks to VRR the HDMI consortium has devised QMS to avoid this due to its continuously variable timing.
If the bonk effect occurs during the same video and we have different hertz depending on where we are, this is really very annoying. And it is that until now the change or advance of a different frame rate had the consequence that the whole system had to change resolution at the same time and once done, re-synchronize everything.
Now this is not a limitation, but there is still a single “but”. This counter does not affect the hertz and therefore the framerate, but the resolution. QMS needs the resolution to remain the same in order to work, being able to switch seamlessly between different frame rates.
Other limitations to consider
Although all streaming services can already compensate for different frame rates without issue, there are still some limitations aside from not being able to change the resolution. As the HDMI consortium has dropped, there is a range for QMS at present, although they do not clarify it too much either.
We do know that the minimum range will be 24 Hz , where below QMS it will not be able to work. But above that is what is really important for many users, said consortium only says that you can go from a speed of 60 Hz to one below.
Therefore, it does not go so far as to specify whether the maximum range is effectively 60 Hz to 24 Hz, or if, on the contrary, it is higher and is defined by the resolution / hertz that the medium where it is reproduced or the worst of them in chain. In fact, at the moment there is no more information available, so we will have to wait until they finally clarify it, although it would not be surprising if we could not go beyond 60 Hz due to bandwidth limitations with certain resolutions.
