Wine 8.1 Picks Up Vulkan HDR Extension For Helping With Valve's HDR Gaming Enablement

Now that Wine 8.0 shipped earlier this week, the Wine Git tree is back to accepting new feature patches after it was under a feature freeze since early December. With nearly two months worth of feature work to land, it's been a busy week landing new code for what in turn will be found in the Wine 8.1 bi-weekly development release.

Among the new work landing in Wine Git this week is enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support within the Wine Vulkan code. The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension is for handling high dynamic range (HDR) metadata around color primaries, white point, and luminance range as part of the Vulkan swapchain. This patch for Wine is needed for handling HDR with native Vulkan games like Doom Eternal as well as Direct3D games with HDR support that leverage DXVK or VKD3D-Proton.

Valve was carrying this patch as part of their Wine-based Proton build but now it's been upstreamed for what will be in Wine 8.1+ and then Wine 9.0 stable next year. This os part of Valve's work on supporting HDR games -- currently limited to their Gamescope compositor as the overall Linux desktop is still working to improve its HDR support.

The Wine Vulkan patch for the HDR metadata extension was sent in by Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team. That support was merged via this commit as the Wine piece of the puzzle for bringing up HDR support with Windows games on Linux.