The upcoming Blender 5.0 release is set to bring a notable improvement for Linux: experimental support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering when using the Wayland display server with the Vulkan graphics backend.
This is a big step towards expanding Blender’s rendering capabilities on Linux, offering a more accurate visual preview for artists working in areas like animation, visual effects, and game development.
HDR Support on Blender: Why Does it Matter?
Source: Blender
If you're working in 3D art, animation, or visual effects, HDR can make a noticeable difference. It lets you use displays that support higher brightness, deeper contrast, and a wider range of colors, so what you see in your Blender viewport will be closer to what you’ll see on other HDR screens or in final renders.
This comes at a time when many Linux distributions are transitioning away from the older Xorg display server in favor of Wayland, which is being adopted as the new default display protocol. Wayland offers a more modern architecture designed to improve security, performance, and support for advanced graphical features.
Want to Try it Out?
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HDR support in Blender 5.0 is still experimental and under active development. It isn't stable, and is not recommended for production use at this time.
If you’d like to test the feature and explore its capabilities, follow these steps:
Download the Blender 5.0 alpha build
Get the latest alpha version from the Blender Builds page.
Ensure HDR is enabled on your system
Use an HDR-capable monitor
Run a Wayland session (e.g., GNOME or KDE Plasma)
Enable HDR output in your system’s display settings
Configure Blender for Vulkan and HDR
Launch Blender and go to Preferences > System > Display Graphics
Select Vulkan as the graphics backend
Go to Preferences > Interface and enable Developer Extras
Navigate to Preferences > Experimental and enable Vulkan HDR support Linux/Wayland.
Restart Blender to apply changes
You can learn more about this addition in the original post by Jeroen Bakker from the Blender team.
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