Internal display HDR quirk (13 Pro on Fedora KDE)

Framework Laptop 13
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I’ll preface by saying the display on the FW13 Pro is downright amazing, the refresh rate really does make a difference in the overall feel of using it and the anti-glare coating lets me use my laptop (I do not work on anything sensitive to color accuracy) to 10-20% indoors under reasonable lighting. Text is still easily legible and this drops the idle power consumption to around 4W (from powertop) which I think goes to benefit the already great battery life.

In KDE system settings, I have the option to turn on HDR on the internal display, so I did “because why not”. I have been using the laptop for about a week now, and I noticed a quirk where when waking the laptop from sleep, intermittently there would be a graphical glitch where the screen gets very bright and glitchy graphics for a few seconds. This is intermittent, only happening sometimes when waking from sleep, but I think it happens more often when the laptop has been asleep “for a while” and nearly every time when opening the lid from closed. Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/YX9TV9GSHsE

Not a huge deal, but I figured I’d see if anyone else has experienced this or knows a way to fix it. I noticed this on Fedora 44 but upgraded to 45/rawhide to see if new kernel and system packages would help, but there was no change. I’m putting this in the “framework laptop 13” category rather than the “linux” category since I think it’s at least somewhat hardware/firmware dependent with the HDR internal screen.

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I thought the new 2.8k touch screen didn’t support HDR?

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Yeah I think also. I enabled HDR on the internal screen but then it does look considerably worse, too bright and washed out.

Unlike my AOC external monitor which does support HDR, that one looks much better if I enable HDR for it on the framework so HDR would work software wise.

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Interesting, I had never read the spec sheet and y’all are right, it doesn’t support HDR. It definitely exposes to KDE system settings that HDR is a feature, and when it’s enabled, it definitely tries to do HDR, but I’ve just turned it back off as I don’t think I would ever use it anyway.

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For some reason you can also turn on HDR on Windows, however turning on HDR blocks ICC profile from display settings, which I don’t know why

Grab the ICC profile and select it on KDE settings

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Hmm ok, I’ll try that. But as far as I can see the panel does 10bit colors, it’s just not the dynamic range of HDR, which without local dimming makes not too much sense other than maybe dynamic overall backlight in video which in many cases of smartphone videos has side effects of being just too bright.

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I can change to 16 bit while using HDR. However the “sRGB color intensity” doesn’t seem to do anything

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I tried the profile but it still looks wrong with HDR on, not green enough, all my teal UI elements turned into a steel blue and way less saturated.

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I have this if the color actually is tuned to “prefer efficiency”. I almost always use “prefer color accuracy” since this setting has almost zero impact on battery runtime. However using HDR is going to drain the battery like crazy. HDR is done by making pixels darker while increasing the backlight, which is exactly the opposite of automatic backlight management (ABM).

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I did a quick search on Google and Wikipedia

Google

You are seeing that option because of a combination of the laptop’s modern integrated graphics and Windows/Linux software emulation, but it is not “true” hardware HDR.

Why you can toggle the switch

The integrated GPU (like Intel Arc or AMD Radeon) inside your laptop is fully capable of processing HDR video streams. Because the GPU supports it, the operating system (like Windows 11 or Linux KDE) may erroneously expose the “Use HDR” toggle for the internal screen or offer an “Extended Dynamic Range” mapping option.

What actually happens if you turn it on

If you flip that switch on your Framework 13 Pro display, your operating system will attempt to software-map HDR content down to a standard dynamic range (SDR) space. Because the physical LCD panel lacks the essential hardware components—such as a wide color gamut (it only covers 100% sRGB) and local dimming zones—the output usually doesn’t look right.

Users who force HDR on this panel typically report that the screen looks:

  • Washed out or faded
  • Too bright in gray areas
  • Inaccurate in color shifting, distorting the actual intent of the media

:light_bulb: Recommendation

For the best visual clarity on the internal 2.8K display, leave the HDR toggle off.

Instead, look for a setting in Windows 11 called “Automatically manage color for apps” (Advanced Display Settings). This option utilizes the screen’s full color depth accurately without trying to force fake HDR processing.

Wikipedia

As of 2020, no display is capable of rendering the full range of brightness and color of HDR formats.[29] A display is called an HDR display if it can accept HDR content and map it to its display characteristics,[29] so the HDR logo only provides information about content compatibility and not display capability.

Displays that use global dimming, such as most edge-lit LED displays, cannot display the advanced contrast of HDR content. Some displays implement local dimming technologies, such as OLED and full-array LED-backlighting, to more properly display advanced contrast.[67]

Enabling HDR on the system setting almost double the battery drain. It seems to achieve an HDR-like rendering by increasing the backlight while decreasing the brightness on individial pixels of the LCD.

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For example. If you enable HDR on Windows, you can adjust the slider under the “Windows HD color”. Moving the slider to the right reduces the brightness of the pixels on the left picture. Moving the slider to the left increases the backlight power while decreasing the brightness of pixels everywhere(to make the UI looks the same bright) except the left picture, causing an additional 2 watts.

Enabling HDR can make the screen dimmer at the lowest brightness settings, 7 nits. Without HDR the minimum brightness is similar to the older screen 20.9 nits.

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The efficiency/accuracy switch has no effect on color for me.
Well that’s what I meant when I said that HDR without local dimming makes no sense. To achieve high dynamic range requires a panel that can have parts with lower backlighting. A true HDR monitor like my AOC 32 can do that and there it looks right even with the built-in ICC profile.