CES 2025: HDMI 2.2 raises the bar with next-gen lip sync and greater bandwidth
CES 2025: HDMI 2.2 raises the bar with next-gen lip sync and greater bandwidth
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The HDMI Forum has announced a new version of the standard most of us use to connect stuff to our TVs, dubbed HDMI 2.2. Here’s the difference it makes and why most of us — thankfully — won’t have to worry about it for a good while yet. There are two crucial differences between what we have today, HDMI 2.1, and HDMI 2.2. The new standard will have much greater bandwidth and improved lip-sync thanks to LIP. That stands for Latency Indication Protocol.
If your main use for HDMI connections is for TV and movies, you don’t need to worry about HDMI 2.2 at all. The new bandwidth ceiling is 96Gbps, equivalent to 12,000 megabytes transferred a second. This is double the 48Gbps of HDMI 2.1. But even with the lower cap today there’s more than enough room in the pipe for the 8K video streams from services like Netflix and Prime Video that we don’t even have yet.
So why does this even matter? Gaming is the clearest use for these ultra-high bandwidth connectors. Nvidia just announced the RTX 5090, a monster graphics card that just became the most desirable piece of tech in gaming. It already supports 4K resolutions at 480 frames per second, or 8K output at 120 frames per second and that’s because it has DisplayPort 2.1a. That already has way higher bandwidth than HDMI 2.1 — 80Gbps.
