Wine is a free and open source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run some Windows applications on computers running Linux, FreeBSD or some other operating system. It’s also the basis for the Proton software that Valve uses to let Steam Deck users play Windows games on Linux-powered handhelds.
Wine 8.0 was released this week, and the Wine Git branch is receiving new feature patches after a feature freeze since early December.
New work in Wine Git includes enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support in Wine Vulkan code. the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension is used to handle high dynamic range (HDR) metadata for primary colors, white point, and luminance ranges as part of the Vulkan swap chain. This Wine patch is required to handle HDR for native Vulkan games such as Doom Eternal, as well as Direct3D games with HDR support utilizing DXVK or VKD3D-Proton.
Valve is using 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 compositor, as the entire Linux desktop is still working on improving its HDR support.
The Wine Vulkan patch for HDR metadata extensions was submitted by Joshua Ashton of the Valve Linux team. The support was merged into the Wine software with this commit to provide HDR support for Windows games on Linux.
