I’ve been looking for a DisplayPort to HDMI cable to get around this on our household couch gaming computer. I have been unable to find one sketchy or otherwise that can handle high refresh rate and 4:4:4 color.
But are there any that don't overheat when you try to funnel dual screens through the USB-C/TB4?
The only setup I have that doesn't is a super minimal one that has a single DP out that feeds a daisy-chain (and a single USB out that feeds a simple hub for low bandwidth peripherals, and a PD in). Unfortunately, most of the screen pairs that I run don't do daisy-chain.
Every other hub I tried eventually got me to give up and connect one of the screens through direct HDMI.
The key is to not use TB4; that's far more energy intensive to handle than DP1.4 alt mode (+ MST for 2 displays). Basically the dock needs to be a little shitty and not have too many features...
I usually go for Cable Matters cables, they tend to be of a decent quality and follow the specs well. UGREEN is supposedly a reliable option too, though I cannot personally vouch as I haven't used their cables in particular.
The frame rate won't really be any different, there'll just be a little bit of extra delay until you can actually see the frame that was just rendered, and maybe some barely detectable stutters. Keep in mind we're talking 4K120 or 8K here, the GPU in the Steam Machine is nowhere near fast enough for either of these things. It's likely that there's always some mode with a higher fixed frame rate than what the GPU can calculate, even on Full HD you can probably just do fixed p120 or p144.
VRR is all about smoothness/microstutters, not higher frame rate/performance.
