Enabling HDR for Steam games
I have been pulling my hair out for several days now trying to figure out how the heck to enable HDR in games (specifically Helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima). I read through the release notes for Bazzite 42, and it make it sound as simple as either switching to a Proton version with Wine Wayland or enabling vk_hdr_layer. I have tried both of these, but nothing ever launches with the ability to enable HDR. I have tried Proton 9.0-4 as well as the latest version of Proton GE (9-27). Neither of these Proton versions let me enable HDR in game. I then tried the settings for vk_hdr_layer. I set the registry key in Wine using Protontricks, then I set the launch options "DISPLAY= DXVK_HDR=1 ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 %command%". When I do this, Steam says the game is running, but it never actually launches.
Solution:Jump to solution
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton10-1 Give this a try with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 launch options. Works for me.
GitHub
Release GE-Proton10-1 Released · GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Proton:
GE-Proton rebased on top of Valve's Proton 10 Bleeding Edge
Wine-Wayland has been enabled and patches from upstream wine backported for it. YMMV (Your mileage may vary). Thanks Etaash-...
53 Replies
Why the DISPLAY= ?
That's likely your issue
You don't need any registry changes either
https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1187140365115998291/1350582225573515347
i did this for autoswitching, it’s nice
I got that from here: https://github.com/Zamundaaa/VK_hdr_layer?tab=readme-ov-file#testing-with-wine-wayland
Specifically where it said the DISPLAY variable needed to be unset.
This did get the game to launch with the option to enable HDR, but when I enable HDR, the colors are muted.
GitHub
GitHub - Zamundaaa/VK_hdr_layer: Hacks. Don't use for serious color...
Hacks. Don't use for serious color work. Contribute to Zamundaaa/VK_hdr_layer development by creating an account on GitHub.
okay, but did you switch your actual monitor to HDR?
And also remove display and the registry entry
Then reread that section and question why you did that
Yes, HDR is enabled in Settings for my display
Sorry, I wasn't clear with my last message. I removed the "DISPLAY=" launch option, and that got the game to actually launch with the HDR option but with muted colors. I checked for Ghost of Tsushima, and it looks like I already removed the reg key for this game. So this is my current launch option that has the HDR option available in game, but the colors are muted: "env DXVK_HDR=1 ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 %command%"
I noticed that this also works: "env DXVK_HDR=1 %command%", but the colors are still muted
The last command will just take away the Vulkan layer required for HDR to actually make it to your display
If your colors are muted you need to adjust them, there's numerous launch options for that
HDR is complicated and lots of displays are shitty and lie about their HDR capability
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but could you point me in the right direction for some of those options? I know for sure that my monitor supports HDR properly. It worked fine when I was previously on Windows, and it still works for me in macOS. I've seen similar behavior before (muted colors) when force enabling HDR on a non-HDR display. Or in Discord, if someone streams a game in HDR, the colors look muted for everyone watching the stream
I've also been experimenting with HDR. It used to work well in the first version of 42 with gamescope and washed out colours without it.
Then, after the first two updates, gamescope started crashing right away.
In any case, I'd love to be able to ditch it.
I remember washed out colours being a problem in some older Nvidia driver that was fixed in the end.
Also, mpv has excellent colours OOB when playing an HDR video. It's not washed out at all.
I'm also having my mind blown by the fact that my Vulkan application doesn't find any HDR-enabled surface to render into even though mpv and Steam games do...
From my very limited knowledge of HDR, it seems to me what is going on is the launch options trick the game into thinking the display supports HDR (regardless of if it actually does or not), but Wine is clamping the HDR back to SDR, hence the washed out colors
This could be entirely incorrect. My knowledge of HDR is just a few minutes of googling and a lot of guessing
That would make sense. It doesn't seem like the HDR actually works, but it's hard to tell from washed out colours.
Since you're here, have you had any luck with gamescope? I'd like to at least debut mine and see why it is the working anymore, but I'm not sure where I can read the logs.
Are you using the gamescope build of Bazzite or launching games via setting the gamescope launch option?
I'm using scope buddy that's provided by Bazzite.
I just tried using scope buddy, and I don't have the option to enable HDR at all when using gamescope for some reason
Did you launch the game in full screen?
I've been having sort of the same issue as WASTECH and dragostis. Gamescope (via the game launch option; should I use something else?) keeps crashing for me at 4K KDR. Gamescope does work for me personally; HDR works beautifully, but the game always crashes after a couple minutes; I notice that gamescope doesn't seem to save the shaders or anything. And maybe I'm just bad at following directions or wasn't looking in the proper places, but I can't seem to figure out how to actually utilize the VK HDR layer.
For me, launching in fullscreen was essential.
It's muted because of the DXVK_HDR command, because of the previous thing you mentioned; HDR isn't making it to the display.
Interestingly, I can run gamescope separately with vkcube but with a Steam game at 4K it just crashes.
I don't have problems with my Gamescope crashing. I can't even get Gamescope to work with HDR, regardless of if I use fullscreen or not
Sorry, I thought both of you said that. My mistake.
@Kyle Gospo I hate to ping you, but any insight you may be able to provide would be incredibly valuable. I am 100% stuck on getting HDR working in games. When I add the launch options I mentioned previously, the game launches with the ability to enable HDR, but something is clamping the HDR back to SDR so the colors look washed out
Yeah I'm not sure, there's nothing that does that whatsoever
The params I gave you just work for me
All I can recommend is that you check your display settings for your desktop environment and make sure that things are set properly in there
Are you on GNOME or KDE?
Yes
Well... yeah, that's a good point
KDE has far more in-depth settings
Gnome right now only has a toggle
There's some extra launch options for setting the range in dxvk you might want to look at, butif you're at the point of needing that it's very possible your display just doesn't have a good brightness range for HDR
A lot of displays are essentially scams and are only the bare minimum brighter than normal SDR
I have the fancy Alienware 34in curved display. HDR worked previously in Windows and still works on my Mac
How not recommend is it to rebase between gnome and KDE?
If you do so basically you can kiss any support goodbye
Like I will personally lock and close your requests
Your system is fucked until you reinstall, which you should have done in the first place anyway
Gotcha. Didn't know how awful it was. Reinstall was next on the list so I will get to that now. Thanks
@Kyle Gospo full reinstall with gnome and upgraded back to 42. Same thing. HDR clamping back to SDR
I might have made slight progress. I have been testing more with gamescope, since I know gamescope can actually display things in HDR properly. I was able to get a launch option to work that enables HDR in game, but I ran into the same issue with the muted colors. When I set the gamescope flag --hdr-debug-force-output, I am able to enable HDR in game and the colors are not muted, but it's not actually displaying real HDR. While the colors look fine, it is certianly NOT HDR. It is just fake HDR. I think the issue may be with GNOME. I will try with KDE tomorrow.
Yeah, I see same results as WASTECH with those env var:
DXVK_HDR=1 ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 %command%
Gamescope/Scopebuddy works fine. HDR works as it should, but I can't use gamescope atm because of other issues unrelated to HDR. And yes, my display is a good HDR implementation, high end LG OLED. Windows HDR works fine. Video HDR works fine (with plex, browsers, etc). Scopebuddy SCB_AUTO_HDR=1 works fine. The DXVK_HDR=1 above does not. Totally washed out like WASTECH. So, there is definitely a missing piece there somewhere. I'm pretty much just waiting for gamescope updates to get to bazzite's stable image, so I can go back to that. Might be the best course of action for wine/proton games.Are you on KDE or GNOME? Unfortunately, I can't even get gamescope's HDR working without washed out colors. I tested the gamescope build and it works no problem
I'm on KDE
I made some progress with this. Running vulkaninfo on my rig I'm getting rgba16float on Wayland, but it comes with the wrong colorspace SRGB_NONLINEAR instead of EXTENDED_SRGB_LINEAR.
I tried running a small triangle example and ignoring what looks like incorrect color space and the output looks like what I'd expect from HDR.
So, HDR seems to work but Vulkan is exposing the wrong color space.
So, on my system the issue is that VK_hdr_layer has two variants: 32 and 64 bit but they both have the same name in Vulkan!
I tried using
VK_LAYER_PATH to force it to see only one layer, but I haven't had success with this approach yet.That's correct though
It'll pick the proper one for the given architecture
Every single Vulkan layer does that
I'm getting a bit mismatch error in vkCreateInstance.
More accurately, after a reboot, it even stopped working. Now I'm getting Layer 0 does not exist in the list of available layers even though I'm getting it from vkEnumerateInstanceLayerProperties.
@dragostis I think you may be on to something. Unfortunately, I don't think I am knowledgeable enough to contribute to how this may be corrected
There's also another issue at least on Gnome. The Vk_hdr_layer implementation calls Wayland's set_luminance with ref = 203 and max = 80. It's very likely that these arguments are passed in the wrong order and they should be ref = 80 and max = 203.
I got this working for my small Vulkan binary like this:
I made a custom implicit layer in ~/.config/vulkan/implicit_layer.d without the enable_environment variable so it's always enabled.
Then I build my own version of VK_hdr_layer with a fix for luminance as above where 203 and 80 are swapped.
This makes Linux binaries have HDR OOB, but I haven't managed to get any games to work with it yet.
I stand corrected. The ref is correct at 203, just that Mutter (Gnome) doesn't support a reference which value greater than maximum luminance.
@dragostis any further progress?
A few more updates. I wanted to rule out anything hardware related just to make sure. I tried with both DisplayPort and HDMI with the same results. I also tried on a Samsung HDR monitor, same results. I even tried an entirely different PC with an NVIDIA GPU, same results
Yes. Compiling Vk_hdr_layer with white point ref at 80 instead of 203 and then creating a custom Vulkan implicit layer for it worked for me.
You also have to run it with some newer patched version of Proton. I used CachyOS's version and then you also need
DISPLAY=0 to force it to use Wayland.
However, even though it renders in HDR now, every single game hangs with this version of Proton after a few minutes of playtime. 🥲I've attempted https://github.com/CachyOS/proton-cachyos/releases/tag/cachyos-10.0-20250509-slr
Both the non-V3 and the V3 version (no idea what the difference between the two is)
With the launch options of
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command% , since supposedly the vulkan layer isn't needed if it's natively displaying Wayland, according to how I understand the ver. 42 announcement.
If you want to try it out on the desktop, you can either use a version of Wine with Wine Wayland built in, or enable the HDR support for existing releases of proton thanks to vk_hdr_layer, which we’ve preinstalled for you.Unfortunately, at least for me, instead of a few minutes of playtime, it seems to just hang immediately upon booting. WASTECH, if you want to try this and see if it works for you (since your situation seems somewhat different to ours), you can extract the folders into
~/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d/ and restart Steam and see if it can work with you on that launch option.
Trying Proton CachyOS 9 with DISPLAY=0 %command% and ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 DISPLAY=0 %command% both seem to instantly crash instead of hang.
Mind you I haven't compiled the VK HDR Layer since I have no idea how to even implement something I've compiled myself into Bazzite.
This is annoying since all we need is for either Gamescope to work (since for some of us it's crashing and for others it's just not doing HDR) or for the HDR layer to work, and neither seem to work for some reason.
In theory, this whole entire issue, at least with Steam games, should be null once Valve implements Wine Wayland into whichever Proton build they're going to make it with (I've heard that even though Wine 10 will have Wayland, they're not going to implement Wayland into Proton 10 just yet).Solution
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton10-1 Give this a try with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 launch options. Works for me.
GitHub
Release GE-Proton10-1 Released · GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Proton:
GE-Proton rebased on top of Valve's Proton 10 Bleeding Edge
Wine-Wayland has been enabled and patches from upstream wine backported for it. YMMV (Your mileage may vary). Thanks Etaash-...
^ This HDR support is way better with wine-wayland
It's great that it's here! Unfortunately this still hangs for me as well. Not sure about anyone else though, might be a problem with my installation.
This is working for me. Not sure about stability, but games are launching with HDR and they actually look HDR with no washed out colors.
Played Helldivers 2 for several hours without issue. In the end, I believe my issue was due to not using a build of Proton that had wine wayland support. I thought GE Proton 9 had it, but I guess not
Congrats! May I ask, are you on AMD or Nvidia?
AMD
Gotcha, that makes sense. According to GloriousEggroll himself, this release doesn't seem to play well with NVidia, so that is very likely why I (and others on Nvidia) are hanging.
Looks like it's working well for your end though, so congrats! I'll stop messaging in this channel since the problem's resolved for you.
Remember to mark it as resolved if you haven't already.
Have a great time!
Hey! Just wanted to say thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I was getting washed out HDR in all games on my new monitor, and stumbling on this topic has helped me fix the problem!
For those using Nvidia: Wayland is broken on 570 and hangs after a few seconds of use.
575 fixes that issue, but it still requires the Vk_hdr_layer since the driver doesn't have Wayland color management protocol support.
What is the best way to play in hdr in game mode please?
With an amd gpu
You don't have to do anything, that just works
Thanks! How can I increase the brightness as although it visibly looks better, not necessarily that much brighter in highlights
there's a brightness offset in the settings
somewhere
point of HDR is not controlling the brightness yourself
but there's an offset