Mac Studio m1 ultra and 8k monitor dell up3218k

Mac Studio (2022) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

The Technical Specifications for the M1 Ultra Mac Studio make no mention of support for 8K monitors. The M1 Ultra Mac Studio "simultaneously supports up to five displays" : "up to four Pro Display XDRs (6K resolution at 60 Hz and over a billion colors) over USB-C and one 4K display (4K resolution at 60 Hz and over a billion colors) over HDMI.

The Dell UltraSharp 32 8K Monitor - UP3218K has a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels and a refresh rate of 60 Hz.

An Apple Pro Display XDR has a resolution of 6016 x 3384 pixels.

The monitor manual says that it has "Dual DP to support 7680 x 4320 @ 60Hz".

Google search turns up a post from someone who tried driving this display using two cables from a M1 Max Mac Studio. Unfortunately, the report was that "while the Mac does correctly recognise both halves for the screen at 3840x4320 pixels it appears to have timing issues."

Perhaps things are different with the M1 Ultra, but my guess is that driving this 8K display is a bridge too far. The M1 Ultra is simply two M1 Max chips joined "back to back", so while it might have more GPU cores, and more I/O controllers, total, any particular display generator is going to be the same unit found in a M1 Max.

If you could run four cables with four UHD 4K signals, a M1 Ultra Studio could handle that, but I don't believe that the display has the capability of accepting four input signals and stitching them back together.

the M2 MAX version of the Mac Studio claims to support one 8K display over its HDMI port. but its use seems to cost you TWO additional displays support. That would be using one short "ULTRA" 48 G HDMI cable only.

M2 Max

Simultaneous support for up to five displays:

• Four displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI
• Two displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at up to 240Hz over HDMI

the M2 ULTRA version makes much higher claims, but with ThunderBolt-4 to DisplayPort interfaces and cables we have never seen discussed here. And it costs you the use of several other display interfaces.

M2 Ultra

Simultaneous support for up to eight displays:

• Eight displays with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz
• Six displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
• Three displays with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz

This is the first discussion I have seen where the M2 and later Macs are willing to trade VERY high speed for number of simultaneous display interfaces.

All I could find on that was it has to be a Mac Studio introduced in 2023+ ultra high speed , up to 48 Ghz cable … the monitor you mentioned has 2 DisplayPort connectors on it … plus usb-3 and UsB -A x3, and passthru charging … and the price ? A mere $5,000 plus shipping and taxes ( for the 32” version) .. i’d guess that 8k is the maximum resolution for that chip… you wanted the max resolution from your Mac, and by George, you’re going to get it !! I have heard of 8k tv sets, but considering that most tv shows might be 1080 or 720, with occasional 4k content on the super premium channels , and No 8k stuff( at least not yet—- maybe in 5 years) , even if i could afford to buy one ( which i sure can’t) , i wouldn’t be splashing out$$$ for an 8k tv set. I’d buy a loaded 2019 mac pro or some new teeth first…

anyways, long story short, den.thed is quite correct

john B

I am not sure if you can run a Half-display that tall, but this is an overview of how that should work:

you are connecting a much larger display than can be natively supported, but using TWO cables. Each cable carries the data for the left or right "half-display".

on the Mac, you use the "arrangement" pane to place the two half-displays back together in the correct right/left order.

in the display, you have activated Picture-by-Picture feature (cousin of Picture-in-Picture) to get both halves displayed at the same time.

They act without issue as ONE display, not as two fake displays side by side with a black line between them... and an additional feature is that the two halves can come in on completely different protocols, one HDMI and one DisplayPort family.

your Mac studio M1 ULTRA specs are ambiguous when it comes to EXACTLY what displays are supported and how. it mentions the Apple Pro Display XDR, but from the Wikipedia article on ThunderBolt, we learned that the XDR employs a "cheat" to attain to its 6K nominal resolution:

The Apple Pro Display XDR, which macOS allows to connect using two HBR3 connections to a Mac, doesn't support Display Stream Compression (DSC). That would be 51.84 Gbit/s, impossible for Thunderbolt 3, but it works because the two 3008×3384 10bpc 60 Hz 648.91 MHz signals of the XDR display only require 38.9 Gbit/s total and Thunderbolt does not transmit the DisplayPort stuffing symbols used to fill the HBR3 bandwidth.

in simpler terms, they are cramming TWO Data streams onto that ThunderBolt port, doing automatically what a two cable setup could do manually.

For the optimal results, get and use a short high speed 8K USB-C to DisplayPort cable.

for example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08B3SB5VC/ref=sspa_dk_detail_5?