the heroic launcher was recently updated to support gamescope (installed it through flatpak by installing org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.gamescope 23.08 through the terminal using >flatpak install).
it can be configured with a simple GUI (as seen above) and gives you all the options you could reasonably need. One of the big improvements is that on wayland, unlike when used through steam, it will actually close the game when told to, without requiring you to maunally kill the gamescope process.
valve still requires you to edit text launch options to enable and configure gamescope.
Valve needs to do better with gamescope, this 3rd party FOSS app is embarrasing them.
Gamescope is a microcompositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:
-Spoofing resolutions -turning off VSync on Wayland desktops -using HDR -Upscaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling -Limiting framerates
In particular, gamescope is rendered seperately to your entire desktop, meaning that certain problem games that may have issues when rendered by your normal compositor (wayland or X11) may work fine under gamescope. For instance: certain games may have jerky mouse input or frequent crashes when running under wayland, but those issue may disappear when running within gamescope.
(this is also why we call gamescope a micro-compositor, as it runs seperately to your main compositor that handles your desktop e.g. Wayland or X11)
What’s Gamescope?
Valve’s custom wayland compositor used on steam os
What’s a “Wayland compositor”?
The program that draws pixels on your screen. (Not exactly but close enough)
I mean…you’re mostly right, but I don’t know how setting a few flags like -H,-W,-h,-w is that big of an issue. I agree lutris and maybe heroic (I don’t use) have frontends for these,but I would hardly that “way better”.
Edit: grammar,typos
it’s incredible how out of touch this community is with the average end user. I’d wager that MOST people don’t know how, much less want to set custom flags for every one of their games. Believe it or not people actually like using nice GUIs and rely on simple intuitive frontends, and it’s a massive failure on Valve’s part considering they’re the largest, most mainstream PC gaming platform.
Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)… It’s really not that big a deal.
Yeah. I don’t know what those flags are… Yet.
The moment a game launch fails in that particular way, I will be diving all the way into that particular deep end.
I pretty new to Linux gaming but I love it. Currently playing games directly from Steam and Blizzard games via Bottles. Please help me out with a few questions. What is the use case for gamescope? What is the use case for Heroic? Is it instead of Bottles/Lutris?
Game scope is a micro-compositor, it’s how the Steamdeck handles games and probably steam. Basically the settings there, you can have the game in 1080p but upscaled by FSR/DLSS to 4k. The difference is that only the game is upscaled, not the whole system
Heroic is a launcher for Epic, Amazon, and GOG
Yes, it can be seen as an alternative to Bottles/Lutris but the stores and libraries are baked in
Game scope is a micro-compositor
What is that?
it’s how the Steamdeck handles games and probably steam.
So why would I use this in HGL instead of Steam?
What is that?
Displaying stuff to the screen, the game will tell it “draw this”
So why would I use this in HGL instead of Steam?
If your library is in the other things then you can take advantage of the technology in those games
Gamescope should have lower latency in going from game to screen
I was forced to use heroic launcher because I couldn’t get genshin impact to run on steam from my games drive. It kept pushing it to my home drive and I didn’t want that. I’m now in love with heroic launcher(this is my first time ever using it). So beautiful and very practical. I also use it to install regular .exe files. Very solid. I’m going to donate to the project, that’s how much I actually like it 😄
But Heroic doesn’t launch Steam games, right? Or did they change that recently?
better than lutris?
it’s certainly more streamlined. I think ‘better’ is a more reletive term here. Certainly for non-problem games that will simply work under proton GE, it’s better.
I have more problems with proton GE than just proton. I use ProtonUp-QT to download GE.
Heroic launcher installs Wine-GE by default, so you don’t need protonup-qt
Cool. I will try it for games that need GE.
It IS if you use kde. Lutris looked all messed up on kde for me. And having a 4k screen didn’t help much. Heroic looks sexy AF. I like it a lot.
GameScope is mostly targeted towards the Steam Deck, where it works perfectly fine natively.
Hmm, the GUI is reasonable and easy to understand. I wonder if Gamescope can be changed while the game is running, so it could be put in the Quick Access menu
Playing through games opens great on my desktop but I lose the steam overlay so I just use Wayland proper.
Finally, I really don’t want to use that steam garbage
Gpu selection?
Probably intended for laptops
No, i meant there should be an option to select which card gamescope will use The game will run on the dgpu but gamescope uses the igpu which should help solve problems with nvidia cards, btw gamescope has an option for that
--prefer-vk-device vendorID:deviceIDI think it would be nice having it in the gui
Their discord is top notch. Really patient and helpful when you get stuck. I use heroic to play rocket League on my steam deck
Just wait until you find out about moonlight
