gamescope VS Proton

Compare gamescope vs Proton and see what are their differences.

gamescope

SteamOS session compositing window manager (by ValveSoftware)

Proton

Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components (by ValveSoftware)
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gamescope Proton
56 1,447
2,633 22,612
4.7% 1.7%
9.7 9.6
1 day ago 4 days ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gamescope

Posts with mentions or reviews of gamescope. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-19.
  • The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    I think your information is quite outdated.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.

  • Gamescope -- How do I get this to work on Endeavouros?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 6 Dec 2023
  • Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    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

  • BG3 splitscreen on two monitors?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 29 Oct 2023
    Use gamescope.
  • Help needed to confirm two 3.5 bugs
    2 projects | /r/SteamDeck | 24 Sep 2023
    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.
  • I haven't seen much posted about it here, so I wanted to point out Valve's gamescope micro-compositor (Linux Gaming)
    1 project | /r/linux | 21 Sep 2023
  • Gamescope adds support for Reshade effects
    1 project | /r/ReShade | 17 Sep 2023
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 17 Sep 2023
  • Force V-Sync or limit fps in proton games
    4 projects | /r/linux_gaming | 5 Sep 2023
    Mangohud (GOverlay), libstrangle, gamescope. Pick your poison.
  • FYI on video corruption in cmd and terminal windows
    1 project | /r/EryingMotherboard | 20 Aug 2023
    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

Proton

Posts with mentions or reviews of Proton. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-30.
  • Kerbal Space Program 2 is not playable on Linux with Proton
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
  • Proton, a fast and lightweight alternative to Apache Flink
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    Or Valve's Proton[0], a tool for playing Windows games on Linux.

    https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

  • Proton 8.0-5 (Valve/ValveSoftware/Steam/SteamPlay/Wine/WineHQ/Linux/VideoGame)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
  • Red Dead Redemption not working
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 11 Dec 2023
  • Cyberpunk Issues
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 11 Dec 2023
  • Updated my citybuilder Trappist, switched to Vulkan, is anyone still dependent on OpenGL?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 10 Dec 2023
  • NTFS messes up
    1 project | /r/pop_os | 10 Dec 2023
    Did you mount it with the correct flags?
  • How do I use multiple hard drives on Kubuntu for steam?
    2 projects | /r/Kubuntu | 10 Dec 2023
    there is a hack to try and use your existing windows game install from an NTFS drive, but i don't recommend it as steam will try to save file names that are not allowed on NTFS...plus ext4 is faster.
  • Game crashes within 10 seconds of launching unless I reinstall from scratch
    2 projects | /r/satisfactory | 9 Dec 2023
    From a quick search, here's what I found. It looks like you're encountering some common issues that can occur with games running on Linux through Proton, especially with the recent updates to games like Satisfactory that might affect compatibility. The log entries you're seeing related to D3DCompile2 failing to compile shader and the issues with Ternary operator and LinearToSrgbBranching not being defined, suggest that there's a problem with shader compilation. This can often be related to the version of Proton or the graphics drivers you are using. Some users have reported that the game does launch with the -vulkan option but with graphical glitches and lower performance, which indicates that the Vulkan renderer is working but possibly not optimally on your setup. From the discussions in the community, users have suggested ensuring that the latest drivers for your graphics card are installed and, if using an Intel GPU, that the Mesa drivers are up to date since Intel XeSS references were found in the logs. If you're using NVIDIA graphics, make sure you have the latest drivers and possibly set the PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command% to enable DLSS if you're under Vulkan. If you're using an Optimus laptop with both Intel and NVIDIA GPUs, make sure your Optimus setup is correctly configured. Some users have found success by specifying DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAMES=GeForce to force the game to use the NVIDIA GPU. It's also worth noting that if you're encountering issues with DirectX 11, you might want to try forcing the game to use DirectX 10 if possible or look into DXVK configurations that could resolve compatibility issues. Lastly, if none of these solutions work, you could try running a trace with apitrace to gather more detailed logs that might point to the specific issue. If you're still stuck, it would be a good idea to report the issue to the Proton GitHub page or seek further assistance in the game's community forums where others might have encountered and solved similar issues. For more information and to find others who might have resolved similar issues, check out the community discussions on GitHub​​, Steam Community​​, and the DXVK GitHub page​​.
  • Error code TFAV0010
    1 project | /r/thefinals | 9 Dec 2023
    This has been reported to the proton team here : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7317

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gamescope and Proton you can also consider the following projects:

gamescope-session - ChimeraOS session on Gamescope - Own personal repository, issues and forks should be made on ChimeraOS/gamescope-session

lutris - Lutris desktop client

gamemode - Optimise Linux system performance on demand

proton-ge-custom - Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components

holoiso - SteamOS 3 (Holo) archiso configuration

dxvk-async

MangoHud - A Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more. Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Gj5YmBb

mf-install - Media Foundation workaround for Wine

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

yuzu - Nintendo Switch emulator

LatencyFleX - Vendor agnostic latency reduction middleware. An alternative to NVIDIA Reflex.

gamescope - SteamOS session compositing window manager [Moved to: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope]