Sparkle’s ‘Thundermage’ concept pitches Thunderbolt as a GPU port

Traditionally, PC graphics cards have included two types of ports: DisplayPort and HDMI. Now, they may be adding a third: Thunderbolt.

Sparkle showed what it called “Project Thundermage” this year at Computex, a prototype OPC graphics card that put HDMI, DisplayPort, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports onto the same graphics card. The tell, however, was the partner: Intel, whose “Battlemage” Arc GPUs were paired with the Intel “Barlow Ridge” Thunderbolt 5 controller.

To date, graphics cards have taken advantage of either the latest DisplayPort or HDMI ports, which both offer the bandwidth necessary for gaming-class displays — such as in the graphics card above, which isn’t from Sparkle. Meanwhile, displays with integrated USB-C ports were typically paired with laptops with Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 ports for laptop docking stations: perfect for productivity, but lacking support for the high-refresh-rate displays normally associated with gaming.

Thunderbolt 5, however, alters that equation. Thunderbolt 5 offers 80Gbits/s upstream, and even 120Gbits/s in certain cases. That’s enough for both high-resolution content creation as well as high-speed gaming, provided that manufacturers support it. It’s not clear whether display makers will be willing to add yet another port to their displays, but Intel partner Sparkle is obviously making the case that it could.

Videocardz, which noted a @akiba_ten_M’s photo showing off Sparkle’s booth, notes that Thunderbolt’s integrated power delivery could be used to power external displays, too. That seems less likely, but certainly could be a way to reduce the cost of an external display.