The next version of HDMI is said to launch at CES 2025, with 'a wide range of higher resolutions and refresh rates' and a new cable

Your graphics card will almost certainly have at least one, and you may use it to attach a gaming monitor. TVs and consoles use them exclusively. I am, of course, talking about the humble HDMI port and it's being reported that the next version of the display interface will be announced at the big CES event in January.

Hardware rumours are ten-a-penny at the moment but this one apparently stems from an HDMI press release, according to the Italian site, Digital Day. It says that HDMI v2.2 will be officially announced at the Las Vegas tech event CES 2025 and that "[t]he new specification, featuring next-gen HDMI technology and increased bandwidth, will support a wide range of higher resolutions and refresh rates, supported by a new HDMI cable."

That's…err…not a lot to go on if I'm honest, but reading around various tech sites shows that it isn't stopping folks from making all kinds of wild claims as to what the new specifications will entail. HDMI 2.2 will obviously offer more bandwidth than the current 2.1 interface but exactly how much is a total mystery at this point.

With a maximum data rate of 42 Gbps, an HDMI 2.1 connection is good for 4K 120 Hz without compression, and up to 10K 100 Hz with Display Stream Compression (DSC). However, whether you actually get that depends on what the graphics card and monitor both support and the cable used.

To get the maximum data rate, you have to use an HDMI cable that's properly rated ("Ultra High Speed") and this would appear to be the same with the new 2.2 specification. Assuming that it's still using the same signalling system as in 2.1 but just at a higher data rate, an HDMI 2.2 socket will be backwards compatible with other previous versions, but whatever super-duper bandwidth it offers will be dependent on using a new cable. "Super-Duper Ultra High Speed," anyone?

Gaming monitors top out at 4K 240 Hz at the moment, which HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0 both support, so you might be wondering what need there is for a new specification that offers even higher resolution and refresh rate combinations. The gaming industry is all about numbers, so we will eventually see 4K 360 Hz and even 8K 144 Hz monitors at some point. To comfortably reach those figures, a faster display is required.

Of course, one will need a ridiculously powerful graphics card to churn out such figures in games and as we're expecting AMD and Nvidia to announce RDNA 4 and Blackwell GPUs at CES 2025, we could potentially see one of them supporting the new spec just for marketing kudos. HDMI 2.1 has been used by both companies for at least two generations of GPUs so there's a small chance that one of them may make the jump.