Displaying a game’s (or any Vulkan application’s) contents in High Dynamic Range (HDR) on Linux requires an HDR-capable Wayland desktop1 and two Vulkan extensions: VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace and VK_EXT_hdr_metadata. Both extensions are supported by Mesa drivers as of last year, meaning AMD and Intel users do not need additional tools. For Nvidia users, however, VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace is still missing on Linux, while VK_EXT_hdr_metadata has been supported since driver version 580.94.11. Fortunately, the open source project VK_hdr_layer implements these extensions on top of existing Wayland protocols.

Motivation

I personally am a big fan of the Universal Blue family of atomic, Fedora-based Linux distributions. This might come as a surprise, seeing that I’m a NixOS user and contributor myself (and a nixpkgs committer even). From my perspective, they can offer a lot of the benefits NixOS provides to a user base that might not be able to get familiar with NixOS, like atomic updates or easy rollbacks.

  1. Gamescope is also capable of displaying X11 applications in HDR, but I prefer using the features directly offered by my KDE Plasma desktop environment. ↩︎