The HDMI Forum confirmed that it will develop a next-generation HDMI standard with higher bandwidth, and the latest press release indicates that new cables or improvements to existing specifications may be introduced. Additionally, this could mean we'll have the new HDMI 2.2 specification. The current HDMI 2.1 specification was developed in 2017 and provides up to 48Gbps bandwidth, supporting 4K at 144Hz and 8K at 30Hz in native non-DSC configurations. When combined with Display Stream Compression (DSC) technology, current standards can handle 10K at 120Hz.
"The new specifications feature HDMI next-generation technology and increased bandwidth, which will support a variety of higher resolutions and higher refresh rates, powered by new HDMI cables," reads the press release, which mentions the CES 2025 unveiling event.
The development of the new HDMI specification is due to the emergence of other display interface standards, such as DisplayPort2.1, which provides a transmission rate of 80Gbps via UHBR20.
AMD's Radeon RX7000 series and Intel's recently launched Arc Battlemage GPU support UHBR13.5, while Radeon PRO supports UHBR20.
The HDMI Forum is scheduled to release these new specifications on January 6, one day before the official opening of CES2025 on January 7. With NVIDIA's GeForce RTX50 and AMD's Radeon RX8000 series released at CES2025, whether the latest graphics cards support the HDMI2.2 specification will be an interesting topic.