Questions relating to HDR monitors

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unixfreak
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Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by unixfreak »

Hello. In recent months i got a HDR capable monitor. I would typically be running Linux, but there's a lack of support in general.
Within Windows 11 when HDR is enabled in system settings, if i am launching a fullscreen LOVE2D project, my monitor flickers rapidly with coloured artifacts (vertical coloured lines) as if HDR is being rapidly turned on and off. This occurs for several seconds, or much longer if using a loading progress routine where the main loop stalls during drawing at startup.

Some games unrelated to LOVE2D "work" without causing these strange graphical artifacts. Other games also unrelated to LOVE2D do produce them. So does LOVE itself lack any knowledge of things relating to HDR? I'm not sure as i can't find much info on the topic.

Another issue is that after the flicker/artifacts go away, colours are auto enhanced by HDR as you'd expect, but as soon as you quit the game, the Windows 11 desktop itself turns HDR off (colours look very dim/dark), despite Windows 11 settings saying HDR is actually enabled. I have to toggle HDR on/off and back on again manually every time? Is LOVE forcing HDR off, but Windows 11 thinks it's enabled?

Is there any solution to this? Especially when debugging something where you'd be running the game every few seconds, and HDR gets forced off at each quit gets very annoying quickly.


Temporarily, a solution that makes things easier to deal with is to simply disable HDR on the operating system, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having that feature.

Thanks for any insight into this, as i'm not familiar with HDR behaviour.
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dusoft
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Re: Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by dusoft »

unixfreak wrote: Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:07 am Hello. In recent months i got a HDR capable monitor. I would typically be running Linux, but there's a lack of support in general.
Within Windows 11 when HDR is enabled in system settings, if i am launching a fullscreen LOVE2D project, my monitor flickers rapidly with coloured artifacts (vertical coloured lines) as if HDR is being rapidly turned on and off. This occurs for several seconds, or much longer if using a loading progress routine where the main loop stalls during drawing at startup.

Some games unrelated to LOVE2D "work" without causing these strange graphical artifacts. Other games also unrelated to LOVE2D do produce them. So does LOVE itself lack any knowledge of things relating to HDR? I'm not sure as i can't find much info on the topic.

Another issue is that after the flicker/artifacts go away, colours are auto enhanced by HDR as you'd expect, but as soon as you quit the game, the Windows 11 desktop itself turns HDR off (colours look very dim/dark), despite Windows 11 settings saying HDR is actually enabled. I have to toggle HDR on/off and back on again manually every time? Is LOVE forcing HDR off, but Windows 11 thinks it's enabled?

Is there any solution to this? Especially when debugging something where you'd be running the game every few seconds, and HDR gets forced off at each quit gets very annoying quickly.


Temporarily, a solution that makes things easier to deal with is to simply disable HDR on the operating system, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having that feature.

Thanks for any insight into this, as i'm not familiar with HDR behaviour.
This is more of a Linux-forum question. I think its related to your compositor. Are you using X or Wayland?
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Re: Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by slime »

unixfreak wrote: Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:07 am So does LOVE itself lack any knowledge of things relating to HDR? I'm not sure as i can't find much info on the topic.
Yep, love requests LDR (non-HDR) backbuffer / output, but what actually happens after that request is made is up to the OS and compositor and graphics driver on your system.
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Re: Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by unixfreak »

dusoft wrote: Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:53 am This is more of a Linux-forum question. I think its related to your compositor. Are you using X or Wayland?
It's not, i said in the first line i'm not running Linux...
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Re: Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by unixfreak »

slime wrote: Fri Mar 31, 2023 11:33 am Yep, love requests LDR (non-HDR) backbuffer / output, but what actually happens after that request is made is up to the OS and compositor and graphics driver on your system.
Ok thanks for clarifying. Do you know if there's any plans to support detection of HDR which might help eliminate this weird graphical corruption/flickering?
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Re: Questions relating to HDR monitors

Post by slime »

There are plans to eventually have opt-in HDR output support. But you'd only want to use it if your game code would actually natively support HDR output (which isn't necessarily easy), otherwise colours would look busted. It won't really fix broken graphics drivers / broken window managers.
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