SDL 3.0 Adds Colorspace Concept, More Code Coming From Valve Around HDR

Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software.

The latest major feature work to bring up around SDL3 is an the initial concept of colorspace has been added to the SDL library. Additionally, there are some pending merge requests around high dynamic range (HDR) properties.

This pull by Sam Lantinga of Valve has been merged. The code adds in RGB and YCbCr color types to the SDL interface, color ranges, and other colorspace properties.

Separately there is this pull for adding HDR surface properties and tone mapping from HDR to SDR. Also, another pull thath as been merged for adding support for other HDR color primaries. All of this merged in the past week.

With the beautiful Steam Deck OLED out there, it's great seeing all of the ongoing improvements Valve engineers are working on for better supporting HDR support on Linux for gaming from low-level graphics driver and Wayland work to the SDL library and more.