As the title asks, how does one actually use HDR for games after upgrading to Plasma 6?
This was the feature I was most excited about, and I can hit the HDR button on my display configuration and it looks like the desktop is going into HDR mode, but so far I have had zero luck enabling the HDR feature in games. Every game I’ve tried had the HDR toggle disabled with no way to enable it.
I am running these games under Proton and I’ve tried both 8-GE and 9 Beta. Any tips?
Edit: probably important to note that I am using an AMD GPU under Wayland
To play Proton games you only need the latest gamescope from git, the HDR layer and environment variables are no longer needed for gamescope
Just set the launch arguments on Steam for any game to:
gamescope --hdr-enabled --nested-refresh 165 --fullscreen --steam -w 3440 -W 3440 -h 1440 -H 1440 -- %command%
.Don’t forget to set your refresh rate and resolution.
If you want to play videos files in HDR (YouTube also works) you need to use mpv together with the HDR layer.
After installing the layer you can run mpv like this:
ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 mpv --vo=gpu-next --target-colorspace-hint --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
.Thanks, appreciate the write up. Definitely sounds like HDR under Linux has a long way to go to reach the “just works” level.
I asked this in another thread but I would be curious to get different perspectives; could you use
gamescope
andmpv
under Gnome and get HDR support or is KDE’s HDR support essential here?It’s not as long as you might think, by the end of the year we should have out of the box HDR on Linux. At least for Proton games. All the puzzle pieces are there, they just need to be put in place.
No, not until GNOME implements their HDR support. You can however run gamescope and mpv directly in tty instead of KDE/GNOME.
Fingers crossed on the out of the box support.
Thanks again for the knowledge.
On the Steam Deck it already “just works” for a lot of games (with an OLED or an external display). So we’re not that far off for those changes propagating to Desktop.