What's the Current State of HDR Gaming on Linux with OLED Displays?

I’ve been using CachyOS with my PG32UCDM, and HDR works right out of the box for the desktop. For playing games, just add the gamescope command in the startup parameters. I’ve been playing Forza Horizon 5 in HDR, and it looks stunning! By the way, I’m on a 4070Ti.

On GNOME 48, you can enable HDR with a modified EDID, even on displays that don’t support it natively. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 worked fine, while RDR2 required a bit more tweaking. Firefox has some experimental HDR support—though I haven’t tried it myself yet. MPV works right out of the box. Just keep in mind that for Wine games, you’ll either need them natively on Wayland or use Gamescope until they have full Wayland support.

I’ve found it works perfectly out of the box on Bazzite KDE. If you’re running any distro with KDE, HDR should be smooth sailing.

Currently, to get HDR working, you need KDE along with gamescope. There are alternatives like protontkg, but that could require some manual work. If you’re using NVIDIA, I’m not sure about the latest driver support, but AMD’s mesa is doing well. You can use this command for games: `gamescope -w -h -r –hdr-enabled –fullscreen — %command%` and add it to your Steam launch options.

Check out this recent article from Phoronix about HDR on Linux: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-hdr-2025. It covers a lot of the advancements they’ve made.