CachyOS Update today broke HDR ingame?

Issues & Assistance
1

been gaming this morning all fine with hdr enabled, decided to update using cachy-update - now all my games are dark as hell , like hdr is not enabled. looks bad on sdr too… any ideas? desktop etc is unchanged.

proton cachyos-sir (doesnt matter tho, tried proton-ge and cachyos-latest too) proton-ge now promts compatibility tool failed.

.config/environment.d/gaming.conf:

Global Shader increase

MESA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE=12G

Upscaling

PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1

HDR & Display

PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
DXVK_HDR=1

Performance

PROTON_LOCAL_SHADER_CACHE=1

only using gaming-performance %command% on steam commandline.

2

Hi,

iv’e the same problem. Pre Upgrade to 7.1 everything was fine today. After the upgrade, i tested it with wow, the game is dark af. Needed to bump the brightness slider to max to be able to see anything in game. When alt tabbing out of the game, the game gets ultra bright. Something is weird with brightness HDR.

thanks in advance

3

I also exprienced that issue after updating the Kernel to 7.1, only fix was to load snapshot before the update to have kernel 7.0.12-1-cachyos back, also sound is crackling in proton games.
I do not have an HDR monitor and it seems that this kernel update forces HDR to SDR screen in full screen, no environment variable worked to force HDR off

4

I’ve HDR capable displays, but i never turned the feature on. I tried enabling it on the main monitor and did a calibration run. Then i tried starting 007 first light and wow, nothing realy changed. Brightness behaves totally weird in these games, prob. even more games but didn’t try.

thinking about rolling back right now to the previous kernel version 7.0.12-1-cachyos-bore where these problems didn’t exist.

5

i just rolled back, everything working fine again…

6

sigh. i am so annoyed by updates breaking stuff. yet, i’m still amazed by the speed and overall responsiveness of cashyos. however: seriously considering switching to something more stable (zorin, mint), because i’m getting tired of debugging…

7

disabling and enabling hdr in system settings seems to have fixed it for me.

8

doesnt work for me

9

I fixed it by turning off direct scanout. It seems to be an interaction with the new Plasma 6.7 feature and 7.1. Works fine on 6.18 and worked fine on 7.0 so it’s something like that. Before the fix below, HDR was actually working when the game was windowed, just not when full screen (reinforcing the fact that it is a direct scanout interaction between 7.1 and KDE).

Also I have two monitors, only one has HDR, not sure if that is contributing.

I fixed it by editing this file:

sudo nano /etc/environment

I then added this one variable to turn off direct scanout:

KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1

Reboot.

HDR now works for me.

10

this worked for me too. thanks!!

11

As far as i understand this option this is at best just a workaround for this issue or am i wrong? This option will increase load and latency to the application running in full screen.

12

Yes of course it’s a workaround, you are turning off a new feature, I thought it would be obvious since I explicitly said it was a new feature.

But I have been gaming without it for ages, it’s not going to make the difference you think it’s going to make.

So short of turning off HDR or using the previous or LTS kernel, change DE (that will have irs own way to handle the compositor) do you have a fix? It will take a bit before an actual fix happens, it needs a bug filed upstream.

13

i dont have hdr activated an am running into this problem. turning it on/off doesn’t help.

14

Another workaround someone else pointed out to me that has worked is just to change Color accuracy to Prefer color accuracy. Why that works? I dunno is that related to direct scanout?

15

ive tried that too, that didnt work for me either.

//edit:

so after i did a clean install this actually works too, with 10bits per color. no need to edit the /etc/environment

16

You could switch to the LTS kernel in Cachy, that should give you some breathing room from cutting edge updates and give you a more stable experience.

Switching to color accuracy is what worked for me as well and HDR looks better than ever, I’m also guessing it has something to do with direct scanout given the recent changes in Plasma.

17

i can confirm, just changing color accuracy to “prefer accuracy” worked find. I reverted the “disable direct scanout” changes in /etc/environment and everything works just fine again.

18

Thanks guys, switching to “prefer color accuracy” worked great for now. Plasma 6.7.1 is scheduled for Tuesday I believe, the bug should be fixed then.

19

Colo(u)r accuracy swap worked for me as well! It would also “fix” itself if I used a combination of fullscreen and vsync settings inside the games I tested (steam and non-steam games), interestingly enough…

As others of have mentioned, it does seem very related to the feature addition below but I couldn’t find any recent commits in the gitlab repo talking about fixes for it specifically…

Plasma 6.7 is also improving KWin’s heuristics for when it can use direct scan-out for better performance and power conservation of full-screen windows. That stems from a bug report over a game working with direct scan-out when running under XWayland but not working under Proton-GE with Wayland.

20

Same problem here, but no workaround is working for me. Only reverting the last patch has worked for me.

Hoping for a Plasma update to fix this issue.