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