For quite a while now, we’ve had HDMI 2.1 support in graphics cards as well as monitors and TVs (since the GeForce RTX 3000 and Radeon 6000). While monitor and TV resolutions haven’t grown that much still only going up to 8K, refresh rates have been on the rise. And their demands should be addressed by a new version of TV and monitor output interface that’s on its way now – HDMI 2.2.
According to Italian website DDay, the development of the upcoming new version of the standard has reportedly been confirmed by the HDMI Forum and according to its statement, this innovation is intended to increase the data bandwidth of the interface. This means it won’t be some minor incremental change, HDMI 2.2 should be a big upgrade over HDMI 2.1, allowing for higher resolutions and/or frame rates.
HDMI 2.1 has a data bandwidth of 48 Gbps and natively supports 8K resolution at 30 frames per second or 4K at 144 frames per second. While higher resolutions (8K at a higher frame rate, or even 10K at low rate) are possible with DSC compression utilised, it would be nice if compression was not required or could use less aggressive compression ratios.
How much better the HDMI 2.2 capabilities will be is unclear, but it might be a significant leap. One would expect the consortium behind the standard to try to catch up or overtake DisplayPort, which in its latest version (DP 2.0/2.1 in UHBR 20 mode) has an effective usable bandwidth of 77.37 Gbps.
The press release mentions that HDMI 2.2 will apparently introduce use a new type of cable. So the new higher bandwidth signal probably won’t work over existing cabling – it will either have more lines or more strict electrical requirements due to the higher frequency of communication. For this reason too, we would expect HDMI 2.2’s bandwidth and capabilities to increase significantly (by 50% or more).
This new standard could probably be announced next month at CES 2025, as this consumer electronics trade show is often chosen for such purposes. Devices that would use it, however, will probably be coming only much further down the road. Implementation of a new video outputs standard in graphics cards have only appeared up to two to three years after the announcement, in the past (HDMI 2.1 was completed in late 2017, graphics cards with it came out in the fall of 2020).
HDMI 2.2 will probably appear in TVs sooner than that, but it will still take a while. That’s it’s extremely unlikely that we will see this interface already on the new generation of graphics cards (AMD Radeon RX 8000 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000) that are to be unveiled in January.
Sources: DDay, VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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