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Vulkan games say “HDR not supported” when streaming on a virtual display? Here’s the fix

Doom: The Dark Ages and other Vulkan games refuse HDR when game-streaming through a virtual display — even though Windows HDR is on. Here’s why, and how to actually fix it.

You turned on HDR in Windows, your client shows HDR, the desktop streams in HDR — but the moment you open Doom: The Dark Ages (or another Vulkan game) it says “This device does not support HDR.” On a real monitor the same game does HDR fine. Here’s what’s actually going on, and how to fix it.

Why it happens

Game-streaming hosts (Sunshine, Apollo, Moonlight setups, punktfunk) create a virtual display for the game to render to. Windows happily drives that virtual display in HDR — the toggle works and the desktop composites in 10-bit. But Vulkan games ask the GPU driver directly whether the display is HDR, by looking for an HDR color space (VK_COLOR_SPACE_HDR10_ST2084_EXT) in the list of swapchain formats. On a virtual (indirect) display, NVIDIA’s and AMD’s Vulkan drivers don’t list that color space — so the game concludes there’s no HDR display and refuses. DirectX games mostly work because they read HDR a different way; Vulkan games (all of id Tech — Doom, Indiana Jones — among others) hit the gap.

The good news: the pixels actually work

The surprising part: the GPU will happily present an HDR image to that virtual display when a game asks — it just won’t advertise that it can. So the whole problem is a missing entry in a list, not a broken HDR pipeline. That means it’s fixable.

How to fix it

  • Use a host that ships the fix. punktfunk includes a small Vulkan layer that adds the missing HDR formats back for the virtual display — only when HDR is actually on — so Vulkan games detect HDR and just work. Doom: The Dark Ages enables HDR over the virtual display with it.
  • Special-K (works with any host). The free Special-K tool can force HDR into games regardless of what the display advertises — a reliable per-game workaround on Sunshine/Apollo setups.
  • Keep a real HDR display attached. If your streaming PC has an HDR monitor (or an HDR dummy plug) connected and switched on, many games detect HDR again. Not an option for a truly headless box.

What doesn’t help: Windows Auto HDR — it only touches DirectX games, never Vulkan.

Want to understand it deeper?

Curious why DirectX HDR works but Vulkan doesn’t on the same virtual display — or building streaming software yourself? See the engineering write-up and how to diagnose it in two minutes. For the full HDR streaming picture, see HDR game streaming that looks like HDR.