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