We've managed to snap a picture of a DisplayPort to DVI dongle and although you wouldn't expect it to be much different from any other dongle, it holds a surprise or two. First of all, we can let you know that this will be a costly solution, and this is why we're likely to see DVI ports for quite some time on graphics cards, as it will be cheaper to keep the ports on the cards than to provide the dongles.

This wasn't the case when DVI took over from D-sub, as DVI is backwards compatible, something DisplayPort isn't to the same degree. To convert the signal from DisplayPort to DVI a small signal converter chip is needed inside the dongle, at least for now, even though the DisplayPort specification is meant to allow for pass-through of DVI and RGB signals.

Having an active converter is always going to be an expensive solution, although there's no need for any kind of power source, as the DisplayPort interface has enough power to drive the signal converter chip. The cable we saw was labeled with DisplayPort 1.1a, which is the latest generation of DisplayPort that adds HDCP 1.3 support. It is feesable to make make a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, but so far we don't know if this can do audio or not.

The problem seems to be with the AUX channel on DisplayPort, as at the moment it's limited to 1Mbit bandwidth, which really isn't much at all, especially when you consider that one of the four display data links can do 1.62 or 2.7Gbps. Either way, DisplayPort is unlikely to fail, as it's meant to be cheaper to incorporate than DVI; and once we see more displays incorporating a DisplayPort connector, DVI is likely to be suffering a long, slow death alongside the humble D-sub connector.