com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope VS gamescope

There is a Flatpak for Gamescope, but it is currently packaged as an extension to Steam's Flatpak, which means that it can't be used outside of that package. Someone opened an issue because it has been recognized that this is a problem for other launchers. Someone has written a manifest to build a Flatpak that exposes it as a Vulkan layer, but it's kind of a big hack and you're not likely to see it in Flathub as it currently is. Running any application with it is very clunky. The author of that manifest feels that Gamescope should be added to the FD.O runtime, but that's not particularly likely. Still, follow that linked issue report for developments on this.

There is a gamescope flatpak. I've never tried using it though.

Please carefully test everything you can. I only tested Gamescope and that part seems to work well. If you want to test out Gamescope, please install com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope: flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope.

Flatpak version: https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope

I think your information is quite outdated. The HWC overlay planes are heavily used, you can see this trivially just doing a 'dumpsys SurfaceFlinger' or grabbing a systrace/perfetto trace. When it falls back to GPU composition it's very obvious as there's a significant hit to latency and more GPU contention.

The overlay capabilities of the modern Snapdragons are also quite absurd. They support like upwards of a dozen overlays now and even have FP16 extended sRGB support. Some HWCs (like the one in the steam deck) even have per plane 3D LUTs for HDR tone mapping (ex https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/blob/master/src/d... )

The composition is bandwidth heavy of course, but for static scenes there's a cache after the HWC in the form of panel self refresh.

One of the unfortunate things about Wayland is every compositor will have its own quality of implementation affecting things like latency.

With XOrg, especially in the pre-compositing days, you could choose whatever WM you want and it wouldn't have any impact on the rendering performance of X clients. Once the Composite extension was added and everyone started running composited X desktops, that started to change, and the increased latency already started appearing - in an arguably worse architecture than Wayland because there were often three processes involved with lots of IPC per draw: X-Client->X-Server->X-Compositor->X-Server->CRTC. At least in Wayland it's more like Wayland-Client->Wayland-Compositor->CRTC.

If you're unhappy with the rendering latency of your Wayland sessions, it may be worth trying alternative compositors... they likely vary significantly. The Valve/Steam folks have made a minimal one specifically optimized for games/low-latency [0]. I doubt the SteamDeck would be seeing as much success as it is if Wayland were so problematic in this department.

[0]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

Use gamescope.

While streaming from the Deck to another device (phone with Steam Link app or another PC running steam), taking a screenshot on the Deck (hold the steam or ... button, and press R1) crashes the session (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/961). This one also impacts Decky Recorder. If you're recording the screen or have replay mode on and take a screenshot, you'll have a crash.

Mangohud (GOverlay), libstrangle, gamescope. Pick your poison.

Hey folks. I've got a 11900H motherboard and use the iGPU and stock Intel graphics drivers that I keep current. Even at baseline (so without overclocking of any kind, with good Corsair memory sticks configured without XMP and regardless of voltage), I would be able to use Windows 11 and the CMD or Terminal programs without issue but after some time they would be corrupt and unreadable. The fix was in Terminal, go into Settings, then Render, and turn on Software Rendering. I hope this helps someone else. FYI the corruption was very much like other Intel UHD graphics samples reported in this link: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356