Developer Melissa Wen recently sent in patches to improve HDR and Colour Management on Linux for Steam Deck and potentially other AMD GPUs. The work is being done by Melissa Wen, Joshua Ashton and collaboration with Harry Wentland.
Exciting stuff, as eventually with this we should see some HDR fun on Linux with the likes of Gamescope. In the RFC (Request For Comments) patches, it was also specifically mentioned that SteamOS 3.5 is aiming to have "gamut mapping, HDR, SDR on HDR, HDR on SDR, and much more".
Excerpts from the RFC:
Joshua Ashton and I (with the great collaboration of Harry Wentland - thanks) have been working on KMS color pipeline enhancement for Steam Deck/SteamOS by exposing the large set of color caps available in AMD display HW.
[…]
So far, we keep these properties' usage under an AMD display config option (STEAM_DECK). However, we are fine with having them fully available to other DCN HW generations. In the current proposal, we are already checking ASICs before exposing a color feature. We can work on 3D LUT resource acquisition details to fit them to DCN 3+ families that support them. Indeed, before moving to these config boundaries, we started working on an open solution for any AMD HW.The userspace case here is Gamescope which is the compositor for SteamOS. It's already using all of this functionality (although with a VALVE1_ prefix instead of AMD) to implement its color management pipeline right now.
Sounds like developers on KDE are interested in the work too, with Wen noting that Xaver Hugl from KDE was interested in experimenting with it for their HDR / colour bring-up too.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
TheRiddick Apr 24, 2023
Better late then never. Would be nice if NVIDIA added better support in their drivers for 10bit(30bpc) and HDR options.To be fair FireFox doesnt even have HDR support on Windows. Would be nice if it gets a push once Linux has HDR support. (maybe even before Chromium get's it under Linux?)
To be fair FireFox doesnt even have HDR support on Windows. Would be nice if it gets a push once Linux has HDR support. (maybe even before Chromium get's it under Linux?)Me personally, can't care more for Firefox and other browsers with HDR.
Media Players, that's what I want. And games.
Rest of Windows in my GUI, is a bonus.
Most youtube content is not HDR anyway. And stuff that advertises itself as one, is usually not HDR either.
In other words, what's HDR?
Philadelphus Apr 24, 2023
It is good to see High Dirigible Reusability coming to Linux. Too many people just treat their dirigibles as disposable, another tragedy of unnecessary waste. Littered dirigibles can float away and become entangled in wind turbines, or smother bird nesting sites.High Dynamic Range, though Wikipedia can probably explain it better than I can. For visual/imaging stuff, I gather it's basically ways to better represent a wider range of illumination levels in an image. (So instead of an image with black shadows and blown-out highlights, one with details in the brightest and darkest bits.) I don't know how it works specifically, though.
In other words, what's HDR?
mr-victory Apr 24, 2023
Meanwhile I can barely distinguish 1080p from 4K and SDR from HDR.
Well I mean if your TV is meh and can't reproduce HDR properly then yeah you won't see a huge difference. Just cause a screen says HDR on the box because it can technically decode it doesn't mean it's a authentic proper HDR experience.
If you have a proper good TV though, preferably an OLED or something that can give you that full contrast, range and pop, a TV that actually produces a full on HDR experience, oh my god is it beautiful. Seems to be quite a few people here who haven't seen HDR or don't even know what it is but I really can't overstate just how gorgeous it is. Borderline more impactful than 4k and really is worth it.
TheRiddick Apr 25, 2023
Better late then never. Would be nice if NVIDIA added better support in their drivers for 10bit(30bpc) and HDR options.To be fair FireFox doesnt even have HDR support on Windows. Would be nice if it gets a push once Linux has HDR support. (maybe even before Chromium get's it under Linux?)
Well windows has AutoHDR for desktop which seems to work fine.
However most people want the HDR for games and media playback, not so much website browsing.
Meanwhile I can barely distinguish 1080p from 4K and SDR from HDR.
Often OLED with its per pixel dimming zones is required to fully understand it. But its just a way to control those dimming zones which almost certainly most peoples monitors don't have, or have limited number of if even.
If you look at a VR helmet like Quest-2 you'll notice most blacks are actually just grey, it has no dimming possible in darker regions or able to brighten lighter/colour regions. Kind of why I find it hard to put on my PICO-4 (similar thing), I just can't stand the terrible colour gamut control and terrible greys everywhere.
Last edited by TheRiddick on 25 April 2023 at 1:57 am UTC
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