LOL. Never tried HDR on Linux but I find it very funny that it sucks on Linux because it sucks on Windows too. What the hell doesn’t it suck on? I need to try it my wife’s Macbook.
Nah, man, they finally fixed it at some point on Windows 11. PCs for the longest time struggled with it, but these days out of four dedicated PC monitors being used by different people in my house right now three are HDR-compatible and working just fine on Windows out of the box, as are multiple portable devices (including, incidentally, the Steam Deck OLED). Plus all TVs in the house, obviously.
HDR was standardized for TVs and started getting content almost a decade ago, it’s been a gaming and video default on consoles for two hardware generations and is increasingly a default feature on even cheap PC monitors. I agree that Windows took waaaay too long to get there, which was incredibly frustrating, considering MS were supporting it just fine on Xbox, but it works well now and I miss it immediately when shifting to Linux on the same setup.
VRR, too, but the situation there is a bit different.
I run W11 daily and it isn’t fixed. Sure, HDR content works but my screen needs to flicker for a bit before it gets enabled and sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t even get me started on games that require you to have it on in the system before you can turn it on in the game. Sure, I could just leave it on all the time but then SDR content looks washed out. I’m not saying it doesn’t work, just that it’s kinda annoying. As you mentioned, I can just turn on my TV, play an HDR video and it works, then switch to a SDR content and it also works. When am I getting that experience on PC?
Hm. SDR content on HDR containers have been working well for me on both DP1.4 and HDMI 2.1-enabled GPUs, no washed out content, which I did use to have. It did not work over HDMI on an Intel A770 I tested where their weird DP-to-HDMI adaptor didn’t support HDR at all (I hear it’s working on the Battlemage cards, thankfully), but it does work over DP, and it also works well out of the box on my monitors using the integrated HDMI out on a 7 series Ryzen APU, so I’m guessing it’s doing fine on newer AMD cards, too.
I do believe you that it’s borked for you, and if you’re on a last-gen card with HDMI 2.0 I have seen it do the old “washed out SDR” garbage even under Win11, so I absolutely concede that it’s still crappier than the way more reliable solutions for TV-focused hardware. Still, it works way more reliably than it used to on Windows and it’s way more finicky and harder to set up on Linux than it is on Windows these days (or outright unsupported, depending on your flavor of DE).
