The innovation of DP is that it's the first video standard to virtualize the physical interface of video. All standards before it directly represented the video timing on the physical layer (e.g. DVI/HDMI bit-clock = bit-depth × pixel clock). DP takes the same video signal (including blanking intervals) and chops it up into packets with some stuffing so as to not change average timing, then transmits them over fixed-rate physical links.