I’m so done with win11, and currently 12 of my 15 machines are linux anyway, but AFAIK HDR (on nvidia gpu) is still impossible? Are you guys all on AMD or just not using hdr for gaming/media? So instead of relying on outdated info, just asking the pros :)
We’re definitely not all on AMD but most of us are.
Personally I don’t understand what all the hubbub is about HDR anyway. It always makes the picture look all washed out and desaturated so I keep it off. I’m obviously missing something.
This is a typical symptom when part of the HDR pipeline is working but not all of it. The HDR image is getting (poorly) converted to SDR before it’s being displayed.
Actual HDR is richer colors than SDR. Note that you basically need an OLED monitor to display it properly. On most LCD monitors that advertise “HDR” support, it won’t look very different.
I have an OLED.
Then you definitely have some settings wrong.
Make sure the monitor is set to HDR mode (in the monitor’s built-in settings), and the OS is set to treat the monitor as HDR. Depending on the OS there may be other things to play with. E.g. I was getting the issue with things looking washed out after the latest bazzite update until I manually installed VK_HDR_LAYER
Here is a site I usually use to test that HDR is working correctly: https://www.wide-gamut.com/test (you may need a chrome based browser, Firefox doesn’t always render it correctly)
Ah that may be it then
Yes, you seem to be missing actual HDR :-) It looks washed out and desaturated if you’d view SDR content while HDR is enabled. Or the monitor can’t. Or whatever else. I even have problems with jellyfin on windows to get it right. That things needs a separate app to actually work. So HDR’s the only good thing about win11, as it mostly works.
I really wanna finally ditch that horrorshow, but going back to SDR feels like going back from 4K to 480p.
I suggest you strip Windows to the bone (including Defender), dual boot Linux, and delegate Windows as a “HDR media OS”
This is what I do, and it works well. Sufficiently neutered, Windows if really quick and out of the way.
It’s already neutered, but dual-booting really isn’t an option. As long as win remains a bootable option, why even add another one, i see no benefit in running both and wasting time switching regularly. Soon i wouldn’t even switch and ditch HDR :)
I don’t really see the logic to that, as switching is near effortless. It takes a couple of seconds to reboot and select the other OS. Ditching HDR, on the other hand, is painful.
Each to their own though.
I want to leave win, if i’d still have to keep it (and not as a very specific vm), why goes through the hassles (everything is already working now) of booting anything else? win is still there and still has to be maintained. I would not gain anything but double the work.
You’d gain HDR!
Windows is nearly effortless to maintain if you only use it for entertainment.
Maybe we just have different priorities, but right now, I’d be miserable and wasting so much time if I was stuck on Linux only, even though I use Linux like 90% of the time. Some media and some games just won’t look right.
And to emphasize, it would take sooo much time to massage this issue on Linux. Dual booting saves me a ton of maintenance and tweaking.
Err, I already main windows (for my rig that is, not the servers). I have HDR and everything else, i would not gain anything i have not right now with dualbooting linux. Except the illusion I have ditched windows while being on linux :)
Everything else i could somehow cope with the loss, replace or code from scratch for linux, except HDR :(
Washed out and desaturated is the opposite of what it should do. Sounds like you may be looking at SDR (non HDR) content with HDR enabled?
Is Linux not able to switch HDR on and off as necessary?
You may have to enable HDR for Linux on each monitor individually from the display settings, and then enable HDR for the game itself from within its own settings.
I only have 1 (large) monitor. I toggle it on and everything looks like butt. Then toggle it off and it looks normal again. It’s an HDR OLED display.
If you’re on KDE, you can use the “sRGB color intensity” to quickly test if your content (e.g. via mpv or Proton) is really in HDR.
If the content changes while going from minimum to maximum in “sRGB color intensity”, it’s SDR, if it does not change, it’s HDR.
I also have an OLED monitor and HDR looks fantastic on KDE.
With my configuration, it does. Though it likely also depends on GPU drivers, Monitor, etc. I’m just speculating as I have no clue beyond “works for me”.
Any games that have an HDR option in their graphics settings would support HDR I hope. Maybe if the display is already in HDR while in desktop mode, it’s possible that launching the game isn’t able to toggle it off?
Completely disagree.
Even setting gaming aside, I’ve started taking family/fun photos in HDR instead of JPEG, and on things that can render them (like smartphones and TVs), they are gorgeous. I can’t imagine going back now.
I took this on a walk this week, completely unedited:
If your browser doesn’t render that, here’s my best attempt at an AVIF conversion:
And JPEG-XL:
On my iPhone or a TV, the sun is so bright it makes you squint, and as yellow-orange as real life. The bridge in shadow is dark but clear. It looks just like I’m standing there, with my eyes adjusting to different parts of the picture.
I love this! It feels like a cold, cozy memory.
Now if I crush it down to an SDR JPEG:
It just doesn’t* look* right. The sun is a paper-white blob, and washed out. And while this is technically not the fault of encoding it as SDR, simply being an 8 bit JPEG crushed all the shadows into blocky grey blobs.
…This is the kicker with HDR. It’s not that it doesn’t look incredible. But the software/display support is just not there.
I bet most browsers viewing this post aren’t rendering those images right, if at all.
Lemmy, a brand new platform, doesn’t even support JXL, HEIF, or AVIF! It doesn’t support any HDR format at all; I had to embed them from catbox.
Here’s an interesting test:
Say what you will about Safari and iOS, but it rocks with image format support. HDR JPEG XL and AVIF render correctly, and look like the original HEIF file from the camera.
Helium (a Chrome fork) is on the left, Firefox on the right, running CachyOS Linux with KDE on a TV, HDR enabled from AMD output.
Firefox fails miserably :(
Chrome sorta gets the AVIF right, though it seems to lose some dynamic range with the sun.