Gamescope

Introduction

Gamescope is a compositor (specifically, a micro-compositor) developed by Valve that runs nested and isolated from the system’s desktop compositor. This allows for gaming-specific tweaks and features to be applied regardless of desktop environment support. Gamescope is also used by default on Valve’s Steam Deck.

Features

Here are some of the well-known features of Gamescope tailored for gaming:

  • Resolution spoofing to force a game to run at a specific resolution and/or aspect ratio (e.g. 4:3 screen ratio stretch)

  • Upscaling support regardless of native game support, including AMD FSR or NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS)

  • ReShade support

  • HDR rendering support

  • Frame limiter (useful for games without a built-in frame limiter)

Installation

The Gamescope package is typically included during Steam installation as detailed here and does not usually require further configuration.

If Gamescope is not installed, you can install it manually with the following command:

sudo dnf install gamescope

For Flatpak-based setups, install it using:

flatpak install gamescope

Requirements

To use Gamescope without issues, ensure the following requirements are met based on your GPU:

  • AMD: Mesa 20.3 or newer

  • Intel: Mesa 21.2 or newer

  • NVIDIA: Proprietary drivers 515.43.04 or newer, or NVIDIA Open Kernel Module drivers

For users with recent NVIDIA GPUs, many have reported better performance and stability when using the NVIDIA Open Kernel Module drivers.

You can try installing the open driver using the following commands:

sudo dnf install rpmfusion-nonfree-release-tainted
sudo dnf swap akmod-nvidia akmod-nvidia-open

NVIDIA users will also need to set the following kernel parameter for Gamescope to function properly:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args='nvidia-drm.modeset=1'

Usage

To run games with Gamescope, you need to prepend gamescope to the game’s launch command. For example, when launching from Steam:

gamescope -- %command%

To see the full list of available options, run the following in your terminal:

gamescope --help

Here are a few commonly used launch options:

  • Run a game at 1920x1080 resolution fixed at 60Hz refresh rate:

    gamescope -W 1920 -H 1080 -r 60 -- %command%

  • Run a game with FSR upscaling from 720p to 1440p:

    gamescope -h 720 -H 1440 -F fsr -- %command%

Gamescope supports both AMD FSR and NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS). You can switch -F fsr to -F nis if you prefer to use NIS as the upscaler.

  • Enable HDR rendering (requires compatible game and display):

    gamescope --hdr-enabled -- %command%

  • Enable variable refresh rate (VRR) on supported displays:

    gamescope --adaptive-sync -- %command%

You can combine multiple options depending on your use case. It’s recommended to read the available options and their usage by running gamescope --help in your terminal.

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