Hi! To enable HDR in most games you will need to set your game in fullscreen. Windowed or Borderless won’t allow you to use HDR functionality.
You’ll also need to use the DXVK_HDR=1 %command% startup variable in steam to enable HDR in any Proton game. Proton 8 and 9 should support HDR without issuez although there are some games that might need additional configuration.
If you use an NVIDIA card, you might need to enable NVAPI with DXVK_ENABLE_NVAPI=1
Gamescope supports hdr with --hdr-enabled --hdr-debug-force-output flags and running the game under it doesn’t require xwayland in my understanding. It doesn’t support nvidia though
If gnome supports hdr too you can. Kde’s support is a part of the stack that needs to support hdr for it to work. The programs and drivers can speak hdr all they want but if the compositor (kde) doesn’t understand and relay the info to the monitor it won’t work.
To play Proton games you only need the latest gamescope from git, the HDR layer and environment variables are no longer needed for gamescope
Just set the launch arguments on Steam for any game to: gamescope --hdr-enabled --nested-refresh 165 --fullscreen --steam -w 3440 -W 3440 -h 1440 -H 1440 – %command%.
Don’t forget to set your refresh rate and resolution.
If you want to play videos files in HDR (YouTube also works) you need to use mpv together with the HDR layer.
After installing the layer you can run mpv like this: ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 mpv --vo=gpu-next --target-colorspace-hint --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ”.
Thanks, appreciate the write up. Definitely sounds like HDR under Linux has a long way to go to reach the “just works” level.
I asked this in another thread but I would be curious to get different perspectives; could you use gamescope and mpv under Gnome and get HDR support or is KDE’s HDR support essential here?
Thanks, appreciate the write up. Definitely sounds like HDR under Linux has a long way to go to reach the “just works” level.
It’s not as long as you might think, by the end of the year we should have out of the box HDR on Linux. At least for Proton games. All the puzzle pieces are there, they just need to be put in place.
could you use gamescope and mpv under Gnome and get HDR support or is KDE’s HDR support essential here?
No, not until GNOME implements their HDR support. You can however run gamescope and mpv directly in tty instead of KDE/GNOME.
On the Steam Deck it already “just works” for a lot of games (with an OLED or an external display). So we’re not that far off for those changes propagating to Desktop.
I finally got a chance to try this out and couldn’t get it to work then I realized you mentioned this was git only right now, and I am all Flatpak’d up, so I need to wait.
What is the specific commit that adds the magic since the last release?
I also normally run in Flatpak but I switched to native until everything settles in. Turns out the config files are compatible now so you can run either and they will pick up the others config with no issue. Just have to watch out with shader pre-compilation because if you have different Mesa versions the clients will pre-compile back and forth all the time.
Shot in the dark - Is there any chance the game data is on a shared NTFS partition? The start > blackscreen > dead pattern often happens if you happen to be accessing the game data from an NTFS partition, but that part of the error message is super deep and not really obvious.
After some more trial and error, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that either the Epic Version can’t actually be run DRM-free, or I’m somehow being too dumb to copy paste the launch option that allows it to.
It still won’t work with Playtron since it also can’t load Windows kernel drivers under Linux.
The only way this could ever happen without also making it work for SteamOS is if they made a deal with Epic to either support user mode anticheat with their OS or to compile and ship ring 0 anticheat with every release of Playtron.
That issue will be true on any linux platform because Epic Games is a nasty company that doesn’t care about consumer friendly practices. How will this device get around that?
Regardless, to say that the Steam Deck is locked down to the steamverse, is such a weird thing to lie about. You can install basically anything on Steam Deck:
Fortnite works (confirmed in beta), both anticheats it uses work, Epic just needs to enable Linux support in the EAC dashboard and ship the library to get EAC to work, and for BattlEYE all that is required is an email. They just don’t care about us.
Is it really worth dealing with Windows’ bullshit to play a native version of a bad competitive shooter from a shitty company, with a controller? It’s not like you can play it offline either.
If gamescope misbehaves, proton-ge releases include wine fshack with fsr capabilities. Select proton-ge as the compatibility tool and add WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 %command% to the launch options. Once in game, select any resolution you like, and it’ll scale it using fsr to your display’s resolution.
Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.
On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.
Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.
Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.
There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.
Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.
I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds
What are the potential challenges and limitations of expecting power users to debug an alpha version of an operating system without providing a desktop environment, particularly in the context of the deck being a partial laptop replacement play poppy playtime chapter 3?
Is it on a tty in embedded mode? If so does switching ttys using CTRL+ALT+F{1…10} work? Usually the display manager is on F1 or F7. If it’s not in embedded mode, does Left Alt + Enter work?
EDIT: Re-read and realized I didn’t understand completely. You’re starting it with your display manager. I’m not sure how you would kill it in that case.
You can see it looks for a script to shutdown steam or defaults to normal shutdown. I pointed os-session-select to a script that restarts my sddm service, before shutting down steam, so it returns me into the default session. It was a bit finicky though and I hacked a systemd service into it to ensure the script didn’t get killed.
Hope this helps. Might clean it up some time and put it in a repository/on the aur.
EDIT: I was inspired by ChimeraOS; it uses that os-session-select for its main project as well to return to the gnome desktop.
That helps a lot, thank you! I will look at it. Would really appreciate if you shared your work. Do you have the problem where you don’t see the menu or is this only me?
I haven’t had the issue with the menu, never had as far as I remember. It might be because of the way you set up the session. If you try installing the aur package I linked and start that session, the menu hopefully just works as it did for me.
That session does not work for me at all, or to be precise, it works only when I disconnect my second display. I might have to search for an option to disable that before launching the session.
Oh interesting & unfortunate. I can confirm I use one display, running it on my TV. I must say, big picture on my desktop session gets closer to the experience than when I initially set this up. I hope they add the quick settings overlay to the normal big picture mode some time. I might switch back to running on my desktop session.
Everything about this seems kinda sus. The website is worded very strangely, makes a lot of big but really vague claims, shits on other OSs, just generally seems… again, “kinda sus” is the best way my lizard brain can describe it.
Valve can’t distribute the codecs legally, but the community sort of can. VLC for example can get away with it because France doesn’t recognize software patents and in general has pretty good interoperability laws. So the codecs exist in open-source form that you can compile yourself. I think Proton-GE does bundle them, and if not I’m sure someone did or at least have instructions to compile with the codecs. We’ve dealt with wmv files in games well before Proton even existed, well before Valve even supported Linux at all.
For the shaders, it’s a normal and one-time thing. Once they’ve been compiled once they’re cached, and then afterwards it doesn’t need to recompile them and you don’t get stutters. What Valve does there is they collect the compiled shaders and distribute them to everyone so it’s faster. So it’ll be a stuttery mess for a couple minutes and it’ll progressively get smoother and smoother as new shaders will become rarer and rarer until they’ve all been seen once.
Right, I’m familiar with what performance looks like when the shaders aren’t compiled, but is it still the very visible and tangible issue that it was back when Proton first came out, when playing a game through Heroic/GOG? If so, do modern enough games relieve the issue by having the shader compilation step within the game itself?
And as for the distribution of those codecs, does Heroic handle that automatically? Or if I have a version of Proton-GE, does it know to use that version when applicable?
Found this note on ProtonDB that recommends Proton-GE and some tweaks such as setting launch options to gamemodecmd %command% and maybe 120 fps as a cap, some other notes are suggesting the latest Halo Infinite update might’ve affected performance a bit.
Ok I just installed gamemode and made sure it was running and passed all tests. Do you enter the game name where %command% is? so for Halo Infinite it is gamemoderun Halo Infinite ? Sorry if this is a dumb question but game wont open now lol
But thanks for help with command it works for other games.
Edit: have no idea It seems whenever I change whatever compatibility I use it breaks after a fresh install. I have reinstalled the game 3 times now boots first time but as soon as I change anything in breaks and brings that image back even if I revert back to what was there…
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