The State Of HDR On The Steam Deck With Valve's Gamescope Compositor

Kicking off XDC 2023 yesterday in Spain was Igalia's Melissa Wen talking about her work on color management with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack to empower Valve's Linux work on the Steam Deck. That was followed by Joshua Ashton of Valve talking about their work on HDR and color management from the Steam OS / Gamescope side for the Steam Deck.

Ashton's talk provided an overview of the HDR and color management work they've been pursuing and ultimately how it's coming together for the Steam Deck with the Gamescope compositor. While things are coming together for the Steam Deck with gaming by Gamescope and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton, ultimately more work is still needed for the Linux desktop side for broad support. There still is open work surrounding the different Linux desktop compositors, Wayland protocols around HDR still in flux, and needing a proper color management user-space API for Linux, among other headaches.

Those wanting to learn more about the HDR / color management work focused on the Steam Deck / Steam OS can see Joshua Ashton's slide deck (PDF). The video recording of Melissa Wen's talk followed by Joshua Ashton at XDC 2023 is embedded below.