HDR and Ray Tracing is on the way to your Steam Deck

Our friend and Valve employee Pierre-Loup Griffais tweeted about the work being done to bring HDR to Linux.

This is big news as HDR has been conspicuously absent on Linux for a while now.

To put it simply: HDR is an extended color range that allows compatible displays to have brighter whites and darker blacks. HDR allows for a higher dynamic range. That's actually what HDR stands for.

In Pierre-Loup's post he mentioned that he was able to test the new HDR support in Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, and Death Stranding: Director's Cut.

While it's not yet ready for prime-time, the fact that Valve's team are testing this means that it could eventually make its way to the Deck. But that's only when the Deck is paired with the right Dock and a display that supports HDR.

But it's not just HDR content that will be available on your Steam Deck.

Raytracing on Deck when?

The radv Vulkan implementation will soon advertise to games that compatible AMD graphics chips have ray tracing (also known as rt) capability.

These changes are now available to experiment with in Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal in the latest mesa build. But hopefully, once more shader work is completed, real-time ray tracing on AMD hardware will be a thing.

We know that the Steam Deck has rt support--albeit limited in scope.

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