Embodiments are provided for early termination of an iterative process of determining channel directions and transmissions in multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) communications systems. In an embodiment, a base station or a user equipment (UE) calculates a multi-user channel matrix using a first iteration of a null-space singular value decomposition (SVD) based iterative zero-forcing (I-ZF) algorithm for multi-user MU-MIMO. The base station or UE repeats updating the multi-user channel matrix using a next iteration of the algorithm and the multi-user channel matrix calculated in a previous iteration, until the diagonal elements of the multi-user channel matrix are greater than the off-diagonal elements by a predefined threshold. Upon determining that the diagonal elements are greater than the off-diagonal elements by the predefined threshold, a plurality of transmission signals are calculated using the last updated multi-user channel matrix.