A Valve designer has revealed that at least one developer associated with the company is working on rebooting HDR for Linux gaming.
Joshua Ashton, who works on key pieces of technology like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, apparently got HDR up and running. The development was spotted by Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais via Twitter (opens in new tab)where he showed both Halo Infinite and Deep Rock Galactic.
I especially find it very spicy to play Microsoft’s flagship series on a Linux machine. There’s something delightfully heretical about that.
Another milestone in Linux gaming: Josh Ashton’s latest work now allows HDR to be enabled for real games! Tested tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will take some time to bake to be useful to most. pic.twitter.com/S7DzLMe6NgJanuary 3, 2023
For enthusiast Steam deck (opens in new tab) viewers eager to read the tea leaves on new hardware developments at valve, this milestone seems important. This announcement could give some hope to the idea that the next Steam Deck will come with a powerful bright OLED display that supports HDR.
Right now that’s pure wishful thinking – and an OLED deck wouldn’t have of course to support HDR, but at least the possibility exists. And if developers get HDR to work smoothly on Linux, it looks like a feature Valve would be excited to support on a future deck.
Valve hinted just last month (opens in new tab) that it would like a revised Steam Deck for better battery life and screen. (Not that a display that challenges HDR-level brightness would do anything other than degrade battery life.) Either way, it’s a cool development.
Joshua Ashton, the developer behind the HDR on Linux, is one of them many independent entrepreneurs (opens in new tab) doing open source development for Valve, much of which feeds back into the open source ecosystem and then supports the larger Linux environment. Ashton Posted (opens in new tab)a tweet showing a heatmap showing the difference in brightness HDR makes.
Here’s DEATH STRANDING DC with HDR on Linux! It’s hard to show off HDR…so bring an HDR Heatmap! Anything that isn’t grayscale is brighter than 100 nits. 🌞🐸 https://t.co/jMft4M2X0Q pic.twitter.com/KvffUZxrYEJanuary 3, 2023
I’m an HDR liker myself, and the gains in graphical depth and fidelity are an exciting prospect if your gaming rig runs on Linux. It might be worth watching the latest generation of OLED monitors go on sale after CES 2023 next weekend.
Either way, it’s great to see Valve not resting on its laurels, but developing the software that underpins the great success of its hardware division. After all, the Steam Deck was easy the most innovative piece of hardware we saw last year. (opens in new tab)