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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone understand how HDMI 2.1 support is now no problem? I remember that 2.1 support in AMD's open source driver was blocked by the HDMI forum, but I haven't heard any news about them unblocking it. What changed?

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It doesn't give any specifics about what changed on the HDMI Forum side, but this article [0] from June indicates that Valve worked closely with AMD to get it pushed through prior to the release of the Steam Machine (which supports HDMI 2.1 VRR).

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/06/valves-hdmi-2-1-...

As far as I can recall: some internal implementation documentation leaked which made the legal position tougher for them somehow to protect it as proprietary (it made sense when I heard it explained, but now I feel like I'm missing an important detail to that), and then Valve had some talks with the HDMI Forum to convince them to let it go, presumably so they could have such support integrated into Linux for their hardware (Deck, Machine, Frame, etc).

So now the HDMI Forum just doesn't really care anymore I guess.

IIRC, a non-AMD contributor was working on adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux's AMD driver, and then AMD managed to get the HDMI Forum to see that their position was moot and was making things very awkward for AMD.

Oh this makes sense! Obviously, it can't be illegal for a non-forum-member to add HDMI support; it's just an HDMI forum policy after all, not law. That's certainly the link I was missing for this to make sense.

presumably someone at Valve said "either you do this or we will pay an open source contributor 100k a year to reimplement every spec you make for the rest of time"

I actually like that reality better

It's not like the policy ever made much sense to begin with. Hard to try to keep track of what a rationale might be enough to convince people who are already being unreasonable!

I've seen some people say that since HDMI 2.2 recently released the HDMI forum doesn't care as much about "protecting" 2.1 anymore.

If FOSS drivers support HDMI 2.2 when devices start shipping with HDMI 2.2 ports then this'll be disproven, but the HDMI forum held off on allowing AMD to implement 2.1 support in their Linux drivers for years and only relented when they released HDMI 2.2. Valve with the Gabecube probably didn't have much to do with it considering how low volume it is.

I just assumed they could tell that the world was getting close to just switching to DP if they kept making hdmi inconvenient, so the choice is be convenient or be irrelevant.

I don't mean that specifically the linux kernel mattered so much to them, but in general for consumers (product makers) all up and down the line.

8K still not working properly

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-More-AMDGPU

I hope they fix it so both of the 8k monitor users can get their displays working soon.

They can already, with DisplayPort.

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