SDL VS gamescope

Wayland works well on the Steam Deck because Valve controls the whole system. Because they have their own Wayland compositor (Gamescope), they're able to implement protocols to work around issues in Wayland without being delayed by the bureaucratic process of getting them approved. Here's an SDL pull request where a graphics developer at Valve discusses how two protocols necessary for good GPU performance haven't been added to Wayland yet so Valve added equivalent protocols to Gamescope as a workaround: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345

One thing to note is that the Steam Deck only uses Wayland for its fullscreen gaming mode. When you exit to its desktop mode (meant for running non-Steam software), it switches to X11.

The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.

[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa

Correct. It's explained here:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...

XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.

Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h

If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

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FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)

It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.

Maybe gamesope can help? Games are nested into it to allow for better control.

Well I suppose you should start taking Wayland seriously then, because gamescope, the compositor on the Steam Deck, uses Wayland. https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope/blob/master/src/wlserver.cpp

Mini-update: I spoke with Josh (and Strudel, who referenced me to the PR), and this has been already merged into gamescope.

Valve staff is also aware they cannot force developers to retrofit 16:10 support into existing games (some do, many don't), so they even go the extra mile to provide extra functionality in gamescope to improve the 16:10 gaming experience for games that only support 16:9 natively.

Source: https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope/issues/474

The ganescope github has all the commands and how to use them: https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

I'm trying out gamescope on my laptop, and I came across ChimeraOS's fork of it. I'm not sure why I would choose one over the other. ChimeraOS mentions something about "session switch", but I'm not sure what that's about.

You can use gamescope on the desktop, I use it for a ton of games like No Man's Sky, Bethesda games, and any others that have alt tab instability.

For those that don't know (like me, three minutes ago) gamescope [1] is a Wayland compositor custom-written for games (and, I believe, what the Steam Deck uses). it's open source, and under the "BSD 2-clause" license.

[1]: https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

I assume that this is because I'm still using ye olde steamos-compositor (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steamos-compositor/.) I'm interested in switching to gamescope (https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope) but I'm getting the feeling it won't work on my 20.04 vintage Ubuntu; the required version of meson isn't available and I can't find a PPA that contains gamescope. My instinct act this point is to just live with the pain, as fully dealing with this will likely involve just switching all the way to Arch to more closely match the newest SteamOS and I just don't want to do that right now. Anyone know if there is a middleground that will support a modern steam big picture mode without having to totally redo everything?