linuxmemes

VESA honestly should ban manufacturers from having anything below HDR 500 certified as HDR, as the specification is so watered down with HDR 400 and below (sRGB? Really? Why not WCG like all the other standards 500 and up?). HDR on a 300 nit display is terrible, and manufacturers should be embarrassed to sell those as HDR.

Have you seen videos or pictures that have dark sections, and there's "banding" where there's a noticeable difference between something black and something very black? Like a sharp border where it's obvious the conversion process from the camera to your screen didn't fully capture a gradient of darkness?

That's due to the process not being able to handle darker areas compared to very bright areas. It's not enough to have an HDR display; the whole chain before then has to support it, as well. When it's done, not only does it get rid of banding, but finer elements in darker areas can pop out and join the rest of the scene.

If you have a theater nearby that offers Dolby Vision films you can try out a version of HDR. They use laser projectors so the blacks can really be pure black. When the screen goes dark just before the movie the entire theater will be pitch black except for emergency lighting. It's glorious.

In a nutshell, it essentially increases the range of brightness values (luminance/gamma to be specific) that can be sent to a display. This allows content to both be brighter, and to display colours more accurately as there are far more brightness levels that can be depicted. This means content can look more lifelike, or have more "pop" by having certain elements be brighter than others. There's more too, and it's up to the game/movie/device as to what it should do with all this extra information it can send to the display. This is especially noticeable on an OLED or QD OLED display, since they can individually dim or brighten every pixel. Nits in this context refers to the brightness of the display - 1000 nits is far brighter than most conventional displays (which are usually in the 300-500 range).

I think that's mostly because it's (a) 60 fps, and (b) they use a lot of pure black to really bring out the contrast on OLED screens.

If you ever get the opportunity, try out HDR ITM tone mapping (essentially a HDR upconversion thing you can do with Gamescope on Linux) playing Persona 3 Reload on a QD OLED monitor (for that extra brightness) in a dark room. Even though it's not even a native HDR game, with ITM it looks so good, especially because it's a game with a lot of dark graphics mixed in with super bright. The text pops, and combat is next-level.

Really good 4K+ scans of film made with HDR in mind can look even better than that. That video demo has some amateurish lighting here and there. Hollywood level professional lighting and production looks extraordinary if tone mapping was properly done during digital scan. Right now there's a lot of bad quality HDR and sketchy OLED panels around, though.

Atmos is friggin' awesome though, same with DTS-X.

In a small room where it's the only light source, it's still a crazy amount of light. My eyes genuinely had to get used to the brightness for a couple minutes after I set it up for the first time, and the walls sometimes looked like the ceiling light was on.

Does Bazzite have a new enough KDE Plasma and Wayland to do Wayland HDR? (works in GE-Proton10-1+)

What sort of system are you on, and what have you been trying? The best setup is with an AMD GPU and a more up to date distro (Fedora, Arch, so on). I can give some help if you need.

Here's a great blog post by one of the people working on it in KDE.

TLDR: typical brightness settings don't include the viewing environment and this is very much a work in progress point in KDE.

https://zamundaaa.github.io/colormanagement/2025/03/31/about-brightness.html

Working fine for me on Bazzite (Silverblue}

For me it works great only when watching a HDR video on mpv and everything else looks washed out and pale. Including the entirety of Firefox and its content.