HDMI 2.1 specification has been released

The HDMI Forum has Tuesday made the HDMI 2.1 standard available to manufacturers. The new standard offers support for higher resolutions and frame rates compared to HDMI 2.0 by almost tripling the data throughput speed.

The announcement of availability was shared on the HDMI Forum website. With the availability of the standard, it will be possible to market devices with the new standard. An HDMI 2.1 cable has already appeared in a web store in September and the Xbox One X should also have support for it.

HDMI 2.1 was announced in January. The standard makes it possible to send 4k images at 120Hz or 8k images at 60Hz. A 10k resolution is also achievable. This is made possible, among other things, by a cable with a bandwidth of 48 Gbit/s. The standard is backwards compatible with the older HDMI standards.

Another new feature of the standard is Game Mode Variable Refresh Rate. This gives HDMI support for dynamic refresh rate, which ensures that the display and the video card or APU work completely synchronously, so that tearing and stuttering are prevented. Previously, this was reserved for displayport, although AMD already demonstrated FreeSync over HDMI.