HDR monitor support - ArchWiki

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This page will serve as a guide to the current state of HDR monitor support on Linux.

## HDR video support

HDR support on Linux is not implemented yet in the display servers, though it is being worked on:

- X.org (and Xorg clients): no support for passing HDR metadata to the display, see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1037#note_521100

- Wayland (and Wayland clients): no support for passing HDR metadata to the display, see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/467 and https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14

- DRM clients can directly pass HDR metadata, but this is not available from regular userspace clients, only specialized software can use it: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm/-/blob/main/include/drm/drm_mode.h#L809

- System76 have announced their new Rust based Cosmic Desktop will have a brand new Wayland compositor (based on Smithay) which will include support for HDR as well as fractional scaling and HiDPI, see https://blog.system76.com/post/november-at-system76-products-promos--cosmic-de.

## HDR gaming support

The recently launched DXVK v2.1 includes HDR support however there are still a few caveats:

1. HDR is currently only supported on AMDGPU.
2. A Gamescope session is required and must be using the `--hdr-enabled` flag.
3. You must set either `DXVK_HDR=1` as a global environment variable or `dxgi.enableHDR = True` in the per app DXVK configuration file.

Categories:

- Graphics
- Graphical user interfaces