Unveiled earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, HDMI 2.2 specifications are now official. Still based on the same connector, the new standard brings a considerable gain over the previous version. Thanks to a maximum bandwidth of 96 Gbit/s, double that of HDMI 2.1, it will be possible to operate 16K screens at 60 Hz, 12K screens at 120 Hz, or 4K screens at 240 Hz without compression. This significant gain enables HDMI 2.2 to outperform DisplayPort 2.1. The latter reaches a maximum data rate of 80 Gbit/s, whereas HDMI 2.2 climbs to 96 Gbit/s, i.e. 20% more. Of course, although at the beginning of this article we talked about a connector that remains the same, you’ll need a cable with Ultra96 certification.

HDMI 2.2: cables will cost a bit of money…

There’s no doubt that to find these cables in the coming weeks, you’ll have to get up early… And that the lucky ones will need to break the bank. Because the HDMI Forum association has set up much more thorough tests, to ensure that certain labelled but faulty models don’t end up on the shelves. This is what happened with version 2.1, which frustrated many customers.

Purists will remember that there are a few restrictions when using very high resolutions. DSC(Display Stream Compression) 1.2a is mandatory to achieve the highest performance. Without compression, maximum definitions and display frequencies depend on color depth. For example, 4K at 480 Hz without compression is only achievable with HDMI 2.2 at 8-bit or 10-bit depth (HDR10), and in 4:2:0 exclusively. To bring us a little closer to the world of PC hardware, we should note that AMD communicated early on that the Reds would support HDMI 2.2 with its next-generation graphics cards (UDNA).