How is the situation of 10-bit colour depth?

Support Graphics & Display
1

I have seen this article HOWTO enable 10-bit color on Linux, but I am not sure if it is up to date.

First, it seems that the documents are for X11. I use Wayland, not X11. Does anything get better in Wayland… or worse?

Secondly, I am currently using Nvidia. On Windows, I could confirm that my monitor can display 10-bit. Linux documents are explaining AMD GPU. Does 10-bit work on Nvidia work at all? If RDNA3 improves Blender speed, I will switch to AMD.

Thirdly, does Chromium 85+ still disable hardware acceleration? How about FireFox? I don’t use Chromium web browser, but there are some apps that use Electron or something, so I need hardware acceleration. Is there any hope that it would be fixed soon (within a couple of years)?

Fourth, does Gnome work well? The document mentions only KDE.

I don’t play games, so I don’t care about Steam, and probably Vulkan … unless non-game productivity apps switch to Vulkan.

2

Hey!

So I’m working on colour grading and trying to figure out more of this HDR stuff now that I can record BM-RAW - I’m curious how this working out for you? I’m on manjaro gnome as well. Hardware acceleration did not work for BlackMagic Davinci Resolve Studio with my AMD Vega56 or Fury cards, so I switched to dual 3060ti for processing the video. The problem is I’m working in SDR rec709 colour space but want to try making some HDR content. Have you had any luck with enabling 10bit/HDR?

3

Well, unfortunately, I had given up the hope of achieving 10bit on Linux. Frankly I had been struggling even to use Nvidia with Wayland, and finally gave it up and decided to move to AMD. I have been watching the used market to buy a Radeon for a reasonable price.

It seems to me that if one wants to do anything graphically advanced, Linux is not one’s friend. I personally hate to use macOS, but probably just using macOS would save you a lot of time, if you are a professional video producer.

4

In my experience, some applications (players like mpv) can utilise 10-bit colour (this is based on personal, anecdotal evidence, so I might be wrong). But desktop environments themselves are lacking :frowning:

Edit: For people who play games via Steam, using 10-bit colour is still (!!!) a no-go, because it will crash the client…

5

I’m going to talk to BM support and see if they can help out at all, but im pretty sure they only support centos 7.3 for some weird reason…

using macOS would save you a …

I hear that a lot from my peers, to just switch to mad/windoze, but im ideologically unable to comply. I feel like ive already compromised for BMDR StUdIo and buying an nViDiA card… probably just should have stuck it out with kdenlive and my dual fury cards… F…

The best I can do for now is just do the colour space transforms, and wait till i can export it for playback on my new to me HDR monitors

I have been watching the used market to buy a Radeon for a reasonable price.

That’s how i got my dual 3060ti cards, won an auction for a “reasonable” price. Quotes because that’s some people’s rent for a month, F video card prices right now… derailed…

games via Steam, using 10-bit colour

Yeah, but gaming in general is kinda broken on AMD cards. Im not going to have the ability/money to try a 7900 anytime soon, which i hear is better finally? Maybe? Probably just hypetrain/propaganda like the rest of the previous cards from them? I’ve always end up experiencing stuttering and errors with amd card(s), which i generally have put up with because I want to support floss development.

(edit)
I know you didn’t specify AMD cards there, and were generally referring to 10-bit colour. I guess I should say that the reason I brought this up is because: In order to use my former mentioned AMD cards with BlackMagic Davinci Resolve/Studio you have to use AMD’s proprietary graphics stack, which I may have posted in these support forums about in the past. This also really sucks for gnu/linux users because it only amplifies and makes generally everything worse graphically. Gaming and movie/editing workflows cant be done on the same machine unless you’re willing to compromise the gaming performance.

The link above that OP started with leads to more discussions upon searching more that just say that the mesa stack is incomplete, but lots of work and progress is being and has been made, that support for wayland is still a future thing, and that x is not really worth putting too much more effort in because of the inherent ability to abuse privileges that it requires.
(/edit)

Thanks for the replies. If I get anywhere with support at blackmagic i’ll let ya’ll know, I suspect they will require I buy this DeckLink – Tech Specs | Blackmagic Design and then probably have to load a blob, but out of my budget for now too.