You aren't wrong academically speaking, abstracted from real world constraints, but you can look at the last couple pages for my thoughts on 2.1.
At the end of the day, we may not see sets until CES (or later) that even have the functionality, and then it is likely at least 2-3 years before anything really takes advantage of VRR. And lossless via ARC is a huge unknown (there are no streaming services offering lossless today) so how you'd ever utilize that remains to be seen. And this is again setting aside that a streaming box will likely accomplish anything you'd want ARC for anyway.
We aren't talking like 1.4 to 2.0 where it enabled HDR/4K (big deal), we're talking about somewhat esoteric features that, even if enabled, may not necessarily have any industry support anyway.
Nice FUD from someone that just bought a TV this year, telling people not to wait for the biggest changes to happen to televisions in probably the last 10 years as far as gaming is concerned: native 120Hz and Variable Refresh Rate support.
If you
need a television, or don't want to wait until CES (2018-01-09) by all means buy one now.
If you're just looking to upgrade and have the opportunity to wait, CES will let you know what HDMI 2.1 features are going to be implemented in 2018's displays.
It will absolutely not be 23 years after release before those features will be usable.
I don't know what your reasoning for that statement is, but VRR is not something that has to be supported on a per-game basis if that's what you're thinking.
It just has to be supported at the system-level and then it should work with all games; new and old.
A lot of people here seem to be downplaying just how big a deal VRR support is.
After buying a G-Sync monitor for my PC, I'll never spend money on a fixed refresh rate display again, because games are the main thing driving those purchases.
I'm perfectly happy with my existing TV for movies.
It's also not at all "easy to argue" manufacturers could update existing sets to support VRR. How many PC monitors have you heard of being upgraded to support FreeSync?
Quite a few displays received firmware updates that added FreeSync support.
Many displays can even support it without a firmware update if you force it in the driver. Some people have even managed to get it working with old CRT monitors.
Great, but lets pump the brakes a second and just see how it plays out over HDMI 2.1, not assume it's all going to work perfectly on day one. That's all I'm really trying to say. Everything is still speculation until we see it in action.
I'll be a sad panda if there is no true Gsync support on future VRR TVs.
I'm not sure why you would assume that it won't work right away, if you have hardware that supports it.
Even if your current GPU or games console does not, the point is that most people don't buy a new TV more frequently than every 5 years or so. My current TV is ~7 years old now because I've really had no reason to upgrade yet.
The better the TV you have, the less frequently you are likely to upgrade - so an OLED TV gives you fewer reasons to upgrade compared to older LCDs for example.
If I had bought a fixed refresh rate OLED recently, I would be wanting to upgrade it as soon as models with VRR support were released. I would not be able to wait another 7 years for that.
Unless you buy a new TV every couple of years, VRR support is a major feature that will be worth waiting for if you have the option to.
If G-Sync was going to be used in TVs, I would have expected something by now.
Hopefully NVIDIA will support HDMI 2.1 VRR though. I'd prefer not to be forced into switching to AMD GPUs.
Movies won't be VRR, just a higher fixed frame rate. Avatar 2 will be 60 fps, last I read.
Much easier to support using VRR than constantly updating a spec with new fixed refresh rates though.
If the spec is updated from supporting 24/50/60 to 24/48/50/60/120 you cannot release a movie shot at 72 FPS.
If your display supports 24-120Hz VRR you can release a movie running at any framerate you like inside that range.
That's the whole reason we still don't have a 48 FPS release of
The Hobbit movies. The spec currently only supports 24/50/60Hz, not 24-60Hz.