DisplayPort 2.1b and HDMI 2.1b: Everything You Need to Know

When the RTX 40-series launched in 2022 Nvidia was mildly ridiculed for including antiquated DisplayPort 1.4a ports. Nvidia has now silenced the naysayers by upgrading the 50-series to DisplayPort 2.1b, which is a huge upgrade. It is also offering HDMI 2.1b as well, but that is a very minor upgrade from the 2.1 connector it offered on the 40-series, but it is the latest spec at least. AMD and Intel are already using these next-gen outputs for their latest GPUs, though they're not the exact same spec as Nvidia, but overall, the playing field has now been leveled. The big change here is for Nvidia GPU owners though, so let's take a closer look.

Since most PC gamers use DisplayPort, let’s take a look at that connector first. The big news for gamers is Nvidia has officially upgraded this interface from the 40-series to allow for higher resolutions and higher refresh rates. DisplayPort 2.1 offers more than three times the bandwidth of 1.4a, so this is a sizable upgrade. Version 2.1b was announced at CES on January 6th, and but won’t officially arrive in the market until Spring, so that’s when you’ll see monitors and TVs that offer these ports appear on the market.

With DisplayPort 1.4a, Nvidia GPUs were limited to 4K resolution at 120Hz, 5K at 60Hz, or 8K at 30Hz. DisplayPort 2.1 bumps that way up to 4K 480Hz using Display Stream Compression (DSC), or 8K 165Hz with compression. The 2.1b variant that is included with Nvidia 50-series cards and was announced at CES supports longer cables for UHBR20, which stands for Ultra-High Bit Rate at 20Gb/s per-lane, with four lanes on tap for up to 80Gb/s of bandwidth.

The new cables were unveiled at CES by VESA, which is the industry group that ratifies new display standards. The new cables are called DP80LL, with the two L’s in the name signifying “low loss” and the rest of the name translating to DisplayPort 80Gb/s. Previously, there were just passive UHBR20 cables that were restricted to one meter in length, but the new DP80LL cables are active, and can be up to three meters in length. Suffice to say Nvidia 50-series owners should not have a problem with bandwidth when trying to game at 4K using DisplayPort 2.1b, but note you will need a DP80LL cable to enable high-bandwidth transmission at three meters.

The 50-series also includes HDMI 2.1b output as well, which is not the same as the new HDMI 2.2 standard, which was also announced at CES. HDMI 2.2 is a future technology that is not present on any GPUs, and it doubles the bandwidth from 48Gb/s on 2.1 to 96Gb/s, so it might appear in a Super refresh next year, or in the Nvidia 60-series in 2027. It remains unknown when HDMI 2.2 will arrive to the market, but it probably won’t happen for another year, or longer.

For HDMI 2.1b though, it is less capable than DisplayPort, which is why most PC gamers choose the latter. It supports 4K resolution at 120Hz or 8K at 60Hz, which makes it suitable for gaming consoles as it gives them plenty of headroom. Version 2.1b is the latest standard, and it is also relatively new as it came out in late 2023, but there are no major changes compared to HDMI 2.1a for consumers. In general, this is the latest HDMI spec, until version 2.2 comes out in the future.

For what it's worth, AMD and Intel adopted similar output technologies long ago, so Nvidia is late to this party. AMD used HDMI 2.1a and DisplayPort 2.1 on its 7000-series cards from 2022, but the outputs on its new RDNA 4 GPUs have not been revealed yet. Intel's new Arc 580 cards feature DP 2.0 up to UHBR 10 and HDMI 2.1, but since this is a 1080p and 1440p GPU, the older outputs are sufficient as nobody is gaming at 4K with these GPUs.