NVIDIA R545 Linux Beta Driver Brings HDMI Deep Color, Night Color & FB Consoles

[Hibbelharry]

I need to ask... is HDMI 10 "deep color" the same as, or, in some way used for HDR10 support? Or are these two completely different things yet again?

Those are different things. 10bit deep color is about color depth so we're talking about more different displayable colors. HDR is about dynamic range, so we're talking about the difference in between darkest and lightest parts of the image.

[sdack]

Wait, Nvidia kernel driver has already started to utilize Linux kernel's DRM subsystem? I don't understand.

It is about the boot console. I use the EFI and VESA framebuffers for historical reasons as well as to have a boot console that is less dependent on a particular manufacturer. Personally is there just no need for me to have a native DRM-compliant boot console by Nvidia. Maybe the need for such a console has gotten more urgent in recent years, but I do not know why or who really needs this. But perhaps will this allow us to have HDR10 support (... or 10-bit colour) on the boot console in the future?!

[Spike_Spiegel]

I do not see any real issue with nvidia hardware/software under linux. I do not know much how to use windows so I rarely test that. But my old 10 series laptop has never had any issues that were serious enough to remember. My current workstation has a 3090ti using 535.43.13 drivers because I wanted to test starfield. I am kinda impressed that that nvidia guys spent some time and came out with 3 drivers in the last few weeks in order to get the bugs preventing starfield from working fix. I have no bias one way or another but so far I have not experienced anything negative on nvidia since the 980ti I had for a very short while. One thing I find interesting is that in linux drivers the clock speeds self overclock/scale higher than windows I guess this is due to temps as I am liquid cooled. But instead of 1905 mine clocks at 2040 under linux without using any type of overclocking. whereas in windows my gpu is clocked at 1905 max unless overclocking.

I am looking forward to testing these 545.23.06 drivers after my chores are complete.

[spyke]

I need to ask... is HDMI 10 "deep color" the same as, or, in some way used for HDR10 support? Or are these two completely different things yet again?

Deep Color is a requirement for HDR10. It is also used by some SDR video content like 1080p Blu-ray movies, professional apps. It gives less posterization and nicer gradients.

[Danny3]

I wonder what KDE / Gnome developers will say about this, if the HDR support is finally complete in it so they can properly implement HDR support in their DEs.

[MastaG]

I wonder what KDE / Gnome developers will say about this, if the HDR support is finally complete in it so they can properly implement HDR support in their DEs.

AMD already has deep color support in both the kernel and Mesa right?
Or is it still some out of tree patchset which Valve is maintaining for the Steam Deck?
What about Intel?

It would be nice if Gnome 46 would solve the (secondary GPU) performance issues and have a nice little toggle in the settings panel to enable 10bit color output on supported screens

[QwertyChouskie]

Sounds like a banger of a release for Wayland support, I wonder if Gnome's threat to drop X11 got some stuff moving more quickly internally. I'm sure a good bit of this was already in progress, but maybe it was sped up just a tad

(Or it's just a total coincidence)

[Britoid]

It is strange to me that people have had so many issues with NVIDIA drivers for so long. I cannot even remember the last time I had a real issue with installing the driver; it is why I switched to NVIDIA after I replaced my ATI 9800 pro.

The .run installer should be retired, it's the worst way to install the drivers.

[NovenTheHero]

The .run installer should be retired, it's the worst way to install the drivers.

I kinda agree. I don't even remember when the last time I had to use that, but it was probably in the early 00's. With distro package managers able to seamlessly be able to pull the package, build it and make the magic happen it seems a bit silly.

[theriddick]

Those are different things.

10bit color is a hard requirement for HDR modes.