Intel Posts Experimental Patches For Wayland/Weston/Mesa HDR

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Posts Experimental Patches For Wayland/Weston/Mesa HDR

While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Wayland-Mesa-HDR-POC

[uid313]

I don't know why deep color and HDR support wasn't added already 10-20 years ago.

[starshipeleven]

I don't know why deep color and HDR support wasn't added already 10-20 years ago.

No screens able to display it?

[strtj]

No screens able to display it?

That's definitely not true. The medical field has been using 10 and 12 bit color (well, usually grayscale) for a very long time and you'd be surprised how many of their instruments run (ran?) some sort of Unix. SGI supported 48bit color depth (12bpp RGBA) on most of their hardware, including 48bit OpenGL modes; I know it was in place in the late '90s and it may well have been around before that. Traditionally the displays used were CRTs capable of very precise color replication.

[starshipeleven]

That's definitely not true.

Fair enough, I meant consumer-grade screens, not special ones. In many cases they were embedded to some extent in the device, not a standalone screen on VGA or whatever.

[grok]

The Matrox Parhelia graphics card supported 10bit in 2002, but it was a failure for several reasons.

HDR? I believe that relies on white LEDs and these have gotten cheap only very recently. Even in the early 2010s an affordable "lightbulb" was directional, only one watt and cold "white".