Wine 8.1 will add Vulkan HDR extensions, and Valve enhancements support Steam HDR games

CTOnews.com, January 28, Wine is a free and open source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run Windows applications on computers running Linux, FreeBSD, or some other operating system. It is also the basis of Valve's Proton software that allows Steam Deck users to play Windows games on Linux-driven handsets.

Wine 8.0 was released this week, and after functionality has been frozen since early December, the Wine Git branch has begun to accept new feature patches.

Wine Git's new work includes enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support in Wine Vulkan code. The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension is used to process high dynamic range (HDR) metadata for primary colors, white dots, and luminance ranges that are part of the Vulkan exchange chain. This Wine patch is required to handle HDR for native Vulkan games (such as Doom Eternal) and Direct3D games with HDR support that leverages DXVK or VKD3D-Proton.

Valve uses this patch as part of its Wine-based Proton build, which will be used upstream in Wine 8.1 + and next year's Wine 9.0 stable release. This is part of Valve's operating system that supports HDR games-currently limited to their Gamescope synthesizer, as the entire Linux desktop is still trying to improve its HDR support.

CTOnews.com learned that the Wine Vulkan patch for the HDR metadata extension was submitted by Joshua Ashton of the Valve Linux team. This support is merged into Wine software through this submission to provide HDR support for Windows games on Linux.