KDE Begins Laying The Groundwork For HDR Support, Wayland Color Management

[caligula]

730 should be able to handle tonemapping fine.

I've had GT 730 and noticed that it had issues rendering the compositor / desktop environment even without any kind of color correction. Yea I had two 2560x1600 displays back then. You could easily see when dragging large windows from one monitor to another that it couldn't maintain a steady max fps. Maybe it was a driver issue because the nouveau driver actually seemed to perform better than nvidia's proprietary, when using simple desktop apps.

[caligula]

Critical feature? You mean the one feature used by a very small group of people? Right.

Color management is actually pretty common. You see the entry level colorimeters cost less than 100 USD these days. Also many displays are pre-calibrated in the factory and the vendor provides precalibrated profiles for that display (yea I know those need to be adjusted at some point. The prebuilt profiles might even be automatically applied for Windows users. Also some Linux distros set these up automatically. It's just that some are totally ignorant and couldn't care less. Color calibration is a pretty standard low-cost feature for casual end users. It's also becoming more common with home theatre system since most panels and projectors are already good enough, and can't compete with other features.

[Quackdoc]

This was actually a social experiment, sorry about that. I know those systems are ancient and totally unusable in today's computing. The fact is, even Geforce 730 or 1030 class hardware would struggle with HDR tone mapping. Just rendering a smooth 2D desktop using 4k HDR requires quite a bit of CPU/GPU power.

730 should be able to handle tonemapping fine.

[billyswong]

This was actually a social experiment, sorry about that. I know those systems are ancient and totally unusable in today's computing. The fact is, even Geforce 730 or 1030 class hardware would struggle with HDR tone mapping. Just rendering a smooth 2D desktop using 4k HDR requires quite a bit of CPU/GPU power.

Now this is a good question. Proper tonemapping is unavoidable if we want accurate SDR color on HDR screen. The complexity is also high as we can't hardcode it. Firstly we need tunable SDR white brightness for any computer display outside cinema darkroom. Secondly we need to compensate for all the rubbish-quality "HDR" monitors in the market that can't reproduce even 100% P3 color space.

The second issue may fade away in future or we may pretend it doesn't exist, but the first one can't. It is wasteful for an OLED or future Micro-LED monitors to not utilize its HDR capacity in full when one tune down the monitor "brightness". It is also bad if we let undisplayable brightness clip at top abruptly, especially when the bright spot isn't pure white.

[Vistaus]

optimistic about arcan myself

Me too. Arcan would be a much better Wayland replacement, if only a few Qt DE's would support it natively (Arcan has Wayland and X support for apps, though). I love KDE, but even something more simple like LXQt, LiquidShell or Maui Shell would be enough for me to switch from KDE Wayland to LXQt Arcan/LiquidShell Arcan/Maui Shell Arcan.

[Vistaus]

There needs to be an alternative to Wayland. Wayland is too big and too impossible to do anything useful at this point. We need a new paradigm to handle displays.

You mean like Arcan?

[Vistaus]

KDE Wayland without colour management is essentially useless in my case, glad this is getting fixed, however, as such a critical feature it should have been addressed earlier.

Critical feature? You mean the one feature used by a very small group of people? Right.

[caligula]

It is silly to expect ancient ISA/VLB/PCI systems to support HDR desktop environment. Those computers can stay displaying 8-bpc SDR.

This was actually a social experiment, sorry about that. I know those systems are ancient and totally unusable in today's computing. The fact is, even Geforce 730 or 1030 class hardware would struggle with HDR tone mapping. Just rendering a smooth 2D desktop using 4k HDR requires quite a bit of CPU/GPU power.

[billyswong]

The only problem with those features is that the users with really old ISA, VLB, and PCI era systems can't really run modern desktops anymore. They don't have enough shader performance to do those at real time.

It is silly to expect ancient ISA/VLB/PCI systems to support HDR desktop environment. Those computers can stay displaying 8-bpc SDR.

[caligula]

This is what I think, too. My hope is that, with time, many things missing will be integrated (I really would like to see basic objects introduced so that RDP become bearable in Linux) and, somehow, Gnome, KDE, Sway and Weston coalesce around a fairly complete librar(y|ies), instead of the "oh, it is just a protocol".

Gnome still has issues launching multiple Wayland sessions/seats, e.g. via VNC/RDP: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/issues/592

Not sure but this might also be related https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome..._requests/2230