I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work.
To be fair I don’t play a lot of games so I have only used HDR in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring but it worked perfectly in both so I am 2 for 2.
An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.
Plasma is supposed to be able to display SDR content correctly while HDR is enabled (which Windows 10 can’t even do) but I can’t actually test that properly because my monitor doesn’t allow you to disable local dimming while in HDR mode so desktop stuff is completely unusable anyway. But if it doesn’t look right it is probably something you can fix in your monitor’s OSD.
I actually suspect the colors are correct and your normal colors are the incorrect ones. If your monitor has a wider gamut than sRGB you need to either A) set it to sRGB mode or B) use a calibrated ICC profile. If you aren’t doing one of those then all of your colors are oversaturated. When you switch into HDR they are correct but it looks dull in comparison because you’re used to them being wrong. It’s a pretty common thing people experience on Windows as well. Not a lot of people realize their colors are horribly inaccurate by default.
Also, most people only turn HDR on when it’s needed. You can add a keybind for it in Plasma’s shortcut settings. The commands are kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.enable
and kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.disable
. You may need to change the output number to the correct one.
I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then?
Yep. I don’t like it honestly. It’s just an option if you want to set it up once rather than on a per-game basis.
but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR
That’s the thing, even if you pay up there aren’t actually any “good” HDR monitors. At least not in the same way as there are good HDR TVs. That’s why some people use 48 inch TVs as monitors instead of actual monitors. There’s a few monitors that are “good enough” but I wouldn’t call any of them “good” right now. I am one of those people who considers anything below HDR1000 to not be real HDR. If you look at the rtings.com monitor table, out of 317 monitors they’ve reviewed only TWO of them actually hit the 1000 nits of real scene brightness needed for HDR1000. And both are miniLED with local dimming which have haloing and blooming because there’s not enough dimming zones.
I have a feeling that by the time genuinely “good” HDR monitors exist (maybe 2-3 more years) that will be enough time for Linux programs to seamlessly support it instead of requiring launch arguments.
Oh if you have it set to sRGB mode then they should be accurate enough. That means it’s something else. My previous monitor also had a green tint in HDR and that was just because that monitor’s HDR was awful. If you want to check if it’s the monitor itself, you could try it with Windows or attach a Roku/Chromecast/Firestick type device that can output HDR. If it’s still green it’s the monitor’s fault and if it looks fine then it’s Plasma’s fault.
And yeah plenty of monitors have “some HDR support” it’s just not real HDR unless it gets bright enough (and dark enough). The whole point of having a High Dynamic Range is that the range is well… high. Black should be black and extremely bright things should be extremely bright. A lot of monitors advertise “HDR400” or “HDR600” but don’t have local dimming and only go to like 450 nits. At that level it’s barely going to look different from SDR which a lot of people run at 300-400 nits anyway. The overall range of brightness is around 0.2-450 when it should be 0-1000. That 0.2 doesn’t seem like a lot but if you’ve ever seen a completely black image in a dark room you know how not-black that is. Which is why OLED and local dimming are so important for HDR.