EDIT: Something seems to have changed and I’m struggling to figure out what, but HDR has broken again. I’m not sure if it was a system update or not but I no longer see HDR in the display configuration, and running games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands results in washed-out colors when HDR is enabled in them. I will update here if I figure it out.
For those of you like me who are fed up with Microsoft’s BS but invested too heavily in hardware that Linux distros have yet to support well, I finally figured out a way to get HDR games to run well on my Nvidia GPU. This will be a brief description of more or less what I did to get this working. I’m very much a Linux noob so I don’t fully understand the way everything here works but I’m happy to try to answer questions if you have any.
OS: Bazzite –Desktop Nvidia KDE edition (BDNK) Bazzite was developed as a capable alternative to SteamOS on handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, so the website is full of references to HDR, however from my attempts to get this working my understanding is that it’s easier to get that working in Gaming mode which is unsupported on Nvidia GPUs. Nevertheless, this version of Bazzite, while only for desktops, comes with KDE Plasma v6 installed by default meaning it technically supports HDR and you will likely see a difference if you install this version and flip the HDR switch from the display settings. I had tried installing Ubuntu on my desktop before and since it didn’t support HDR all the colors on my monitor were almost obnoxiously saturated; I see the same effect in BDNK when I disable HDR.
Drivers: I didn’t fiddle with my drivers. BDNK comes with up-to-date Nvidia drivers bundled and installs them when you install the OS.
Software: SteamTinkerLaunch (installed using ProtonUp-Qt) SteamTinkerLaunch (STL) is a user interface for making it easy to configure your launch options for any given game in your Steam library. If you don’t know what a compatibility tool is, it’s functionally a layer of software between the game you want to play and the OS you’re using which can tell the game to do certain things that your OS is not configured to do. STL can be added to the list of compatibility tools you have to use in your installation of Steam, though it is not technically a compatibility tool itself. STL is used to configure other compatibility tools that Steam already has at its disposal, like Proton which is the primary compatibility tool SteamOS uses to make Windows games run on Linux.
Follow the instructions in the SteamTinkerLaunch GitHub ReadMe to install the tool and add it as a compatibility tool in your installation of Steam. Once you’ve done that, I recommend rebooting. I have yet to get STL working as the * default * compatibility tool, so for the time being I have been manually editing the properties of each game I have installed (Steam Game Library > right click on a game > click properties > go to the compatibility tab) to set the compatibility tool to STL. From here, whenever you launch the game in Steam, it should bring up STL’s menu before launching the game.
Within STL, the key settings to mark are as follows: Gamescope: Use gamescope and mark HDR as enabled for gamescope. I also recommend setting gamescope to fullscreen with your desired resolution, and then also locking your cursor to the gamescope window so that you don’t end up with weird double mouse cursors that aren’t aligned on the screen. Proton: since you told Steam to use STL instead of Proton as the compatibility tool, you need to tell STL to tell Steam to launch the game with Proton.
And that’s pretty much it. Or at least, that’s all that I did. From there, you should be able to configure HDR settings within each game’s menus.
TL;DR – install Bazzite Desktop Nvidia KDE, then install and configure SteamTinkerLaunch for your games.
What games will this work with? No idea. So far I have tested it with Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM Eternal, and Elden Ring and HDR is looking to me as good as it does in my Windows installation.
Will the Gnome version of Bazzite work for HDR on an Nvidia GPU, or for that matter any other OS as long as I’m using gamescope to run the game with HDR enabled? Good question! I don’t know, please give it a try if you’re curious and respond back with your results.
I have another question that you didn’t list here, what’s your answer? Probably “I don’t know” since what I wrote here is more or less what I know, but by all means ask away and I’ll try to answer it!
Are you enabling HDR on the Display Configuration panel before starting the game or just leaving it off and only enabling HDR with gamescope?
I did enable HDR in the display config. If it’s disabled, all the colors on the desktop are annoyingly saturated. I don’t know if disabling it in the display config will prevent gamescope from using HDR correctly.
Good question, should have been more specific in my post.
Thing is, the colors on my HDR display are all washed out on the desktop if I enable HDR. Specially without a color profile. Are you using a color profile?
That is normal, you have to set the SDR color intensity slider further up in order to get “proper” colors for SDR content.
Still, I would not recommend running the desktop in HDR mode.
Sometimes this can be a bug and HDR isn’t properly enabled. Do you get any sort of HDR notification on your display (i.e. from the monitor/tv UI)?
TV does not recognize HDR mode even though enabling HDR in the Display Configuration does blank the TV for a second when turning it on/off.
Are you using a DP -> HDMI converter? I know they can be temperamental.
You can try switching VTs back and forth (CTRL-ALT-F1 <-> CTRL-ALT-F7), and maybe switching resolution back and forth could help.
Make sure you have the latest kernel and try the latest Plasma 6. If all of that fails, you can try Steam with gamescope running in KMS mode (easiest way to test this would probably be Bazzite or Nobara if your distribution doesn’t support it), but it’s also a bit temperamental with enabling HDR.
Appreciate the response!
Nope, those converters do not allow the HDMI 2.1 spec.
I’m running 6.10.x kernel on plasma 6.1.4. I’ve been bleeding edge because of the NVIDIA card for years now. I’ve been played with gamescope HDR, ICC profiles and everything you can think of since it was first possible.
I’ll have to play with it some more when I have time.
They exist now, although I don’t think there is a working DP 2.0 -> HDMI 2.1 converter yet, so you have to use DSC (visually lossless compression).
Okay. So it’s working. And probably has been working. I’ve been trying to test it with video all this time. VLC and MPV. I decided to setup HDR with Hell Divers and it’s working.
If you want to use with mpv, try this:
ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 mpv --vo=gpu-next --target-colorspace-hint --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvkAlthough I’m surprised you didn’t get a HDR monitor prompt just from enabling the option on the desktop.
THANK YOU. I added the options to my ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf and everything is working. For some reason I was running with
vo=gpuinstead ofvo=gpu-next. I really appreciate the discussion, it seems I didn’t quite understand how the HDR implementation works and was looking at it the wrong way. It makes sense now. I was way overthinking it.I was finally able to fix the washed out issue when enabling HDR.
Turns out my TV has known HDR issues with devices like the AppleTV Apple Discussion I reset the picture to default. Opened the picture menu where it displays the signal. Enabled HDR on the Display Configuration and this time instead of washed out, it was an actual proper HDR desktop.
Interesting. No, I’m not. I’m curious if you would think the desktop colors on my monitor are washed out when HDR is enabled in display config, though I know that’s not particularly helpful. I’m sorry I don’t know much else. I’m disappointed by the lack of any HDR related tuning built into Bazzite though I don’t know enough about HDR to even go about tweaking the colors.
I wouldn’t be. I appreciate the work done so far by KDE and the Plasma team. They just started support with plasma 6. It will improve.
I wouldn’t count on them to solve it. It’s not like they have anything to do with Plasma desktop. They just package existing software in their own distro.
Thanks for the info