KDE KWin Preparing Preliminary Support For Running HDR Games

Xaver Hugl who has been leading much of the KDE KWin feature development in recent years has opened up a preliminary merge request for allowing high dynamic range (HDR) enabled games to work on KDE.

The merge request consists of a subset of the pending Wayland color management protocol implementation. It implements just enough for getting HDR games working. But beyond the KWin patches, you also need to be using the VK_hdr_layer frog-protocol code paired with a Git build of Valve's Gamescope compositor. HDR also needs to be enabled for your capable monitor and then with the appropriate Gamescope compositor launch commands it's possible to get various HDR-enabled games working atop the KDE Plasma desktop.

Games like Cyberpunk 2077 are working while some HDR equipped titles like Doom Eternal rely on monitor EDID parsing for correct HDR handling and that portion isn't yet implemented.

In any event this is a nice start to the HDR gaming support on KDE, as shown by Hugl:

More details for those interested via this merge request.