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

  • DomiEnglish
    10•9 months ago

    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".

    • millionOPEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      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 and mpv under Gnome and get HDR support or is KDE’s HDR support essential here?

      • DomiEnglish
        5•9 months ago

        Thanks, appreciate the write up. Definitely sounds like HDR under Linux has a long way to go to reach the “just works” level.

        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.

        could you use gamescope and mpv under Gnome and get HDR support or is KDE’s HDR support essential here?

        No, not until GNOME implements their HDR support. You can however run gamescope and mpv directly in tty instead of KDE/GNOME.

        • millionOPEnglish
          2•9 months ago

          Fingers crossed on the out of the box support.

          Thanks again for the knowledge.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•9 months ago

        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.

    • millionOPEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      I finally got a chance to try this out and couldn’t get it to work then I realized you mentioned this was git only right now, and I am all Flatpak’d up, so I need to wait.

      What is the specific commit that adds the magic since the last release?

      • DomiEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        Not sure, probably somewhere around when the new Wayland backend was introduced: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/commit/9563271dea5ee4844b16a7e179e9f6bc7ed51168

        I also normally run in Flatpak but I switched to native until everything settles in. Turns out the config files are compatible now so you can run either and they will pick up the others config with no issue. Just have to watch out with shader pre-compilation because if you have different Mesa versions the clients will pre-compile back and forth all the time.

        • millionOPEnglish
          1•9 months ago

          I could compile my own flatpak locally I suppose but I imagine they will do a release soon