KDE Making Good Progress On HDR, Better Gamescope Integration

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor.

One of the existing items in Plasma 6.0 around HDR is an option to choose the SDR brightness from within the display settings when connected to an HDR display. With Plasma 6.1, the brightness slider is more robust and similar to that of adjusting the brightness on laptops and other displays.

Plasma 6.1 also now supports using the color information from the display's Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) as the monitor's color profile.

Over on the Valve Gamescope compositor side, there's a new backend that allows using Wayland subsurfaces to forward contents to the host compositor rather than Gamescope doing all the compositing. With this latest Gamescope code, it can passt HDR content directly to KWin. This new Gamescope backend is also more efficient in terms of reducing image copies.

Currently the recommendation for those wanting to experiment with high dynamic range (HDR) displays for Linux gaming is to be using AMD Radeon graphics with the Linux 6.8 kernel or newer. More details on the latest KWin HDR progress via Xaver's blog.

Happening next week at the Igalia offices in Spain is another Display Next Hackfest where more HDR topics will be taken up by developers along with Wayland enhancements around color management, VRR / frame timing, content-adaptive scaling/sharpening, and related topics. More details on that next display hackfest via the Igalia event page.