After almost a decade, the HDMI cable has been updated. Here’s what you need to know.
HDMI 2.1 has been the standard since 2017
Back in November of 2017 the HDMI Forum released a statement saying that the HDMI 2.1 cable has been finalized which offered up to 8K at 60hz or 4k at 120hz thanks to its increased 48 Gbps bandwidth. At the time it offered advantages over the previous king, the Display Port which could produce the same resolutions and refresh rates but because of it’s smaller 25.9 Gbps bandwidth it needed to compress the data then the TV with uncompressed the feed on the fly.
DisplayPort 2.1 takes the throne in 2022
Things shifted in 2022 as the Display Port standard was updated to 2.1 allowing for 80 Gbps pushing the limit further with 4k at 240hz refresh rates and opening up the world to potential for 16k resolutions. The HDMI Forum was working to refresh the HDMI but with NVIDIA not even adopting a 2.1 DisplayPort until the 50 series cards there were still kinks to get through in hardware before the need was truly there.
Key Specs for Ultra96
Enter the HDMI 2.2 cable. The now dubbed Ultra96 Cable can transfer data at, you guessed it, 96 Gbps allowing for resolutions up to 16k at 60hz or 4k@240hz with 4:4:4. The updated cable is great news for users. That being said, there is only a handful of 8k tvs for sale to us poors currently and none of these offer 8k above 60hz refresh rate which means even though the cable is coming out this month, regular consumers have little use for it for now. The forum went on to say that more hardware using this standard would be released later this year.
Is There Support for 16k Resolutions?
I would say, for at the foreseeable future, these new Ultra96 cables are going to be for commercial applications. Giant multi-panel displays which can actually utilize insane resolutions. It’ll definitely be a bit for PC users to worry about since it took NVIDIA two years to adopt the DisplayPort 2.1 standard and we’d be hard pressed to find a rig powerful enough to play anything in 8k above 30 fps.