Gamescope

Gamescope is a compositor that allows to upscale games with different upscaling methods, similar to Magpie on Windows, but is exactly the same as FSR on the Steam Deck (Gamescope is built-in Steam Deck).

This is useful if you are playing VNs with lower resolution than your monitor and want to make the text and images sharper.

Warning

Be advised that it could slightly ruin image fidelity going for very high upscales since upscaling in 2D games is not that good (unless it’s Magpie on Windows…).

How to get Gamescope

Visit the Github page with building instructions.
Depending on your distro, you can get it from your repo manager like AUR or install it as an optional dependency with Lutris.
When done, to check if it is install correctly enter gamescope --help in console. If text shows, it’s installed properly.

How to upscale VNs with Gamescope in Lutris

Generally, we’ll run our VNs on Lutris. To start, go to Lutris and click on configure on the game/prefix you want to, click on System options and Show advanced options on the bottom.
You will see three fields for Gamescope:

  • Enable Gamescope (check this field)
  • Gamescope output resolution (this is the resolution you want the game to display, generally put your monitor resolution here)
  • Gamescape game resolution (this is the original resolution of the game you are running)

Make sure MangoHud is disabled since it is not compatible with Gamescope yet.
Start up your game, if everything went correctly you will notice it will open in a different window at fullscreen.
If not working / displaying correctly, make sure the VN is running in fullscreen in the in-game settings.

Toggling Gamescope Settings

Now you can toggle the different upscaling methods on the fly with shortcuts. Try to press Super + U to enable FSR. You can exit full screen with Super + F and resize the game window as you want. Gamescope will keep the original aspect ratio so you don’t have to worry. Check out the Github page for the most updated shortcut list.

Shortcut list

  • Super + F, toggle fullscreen
  • Super + N, toggle nearest neighbour filtering
  • Super + U, toggle FSR upscaling
  • Super + Y, toggle NIS upscaling
  • Super + I, increase FSR sharpness by 1
  • Super + O, decrease FSR sharpness by 1
  • Super + S, take screenshot
Info

Currently, screenshots taken are stored in /tmp/gamescope_$DATE.png

Known Issues

Wayland FSR

A recent update to add support for explicit sync has broken the ability to use FSR and others in Wayland desktop. \ Has a workaround you can use --backend sdl to keep it working with the old backend.

Source

Video playback

If you have issues running videos with gamescope that run well without it try running it without WSI

ENABLE_GAMESCOPE_WSI=0 %command%

GNOME Shortcuts

On the Gnome DE, it can be possible that shortcuts do not work, check this link for workaround.
As an alternative, you can disable the gamescope check and enable it as a command in Lutris System Options, Command Prefix For example, to upscale from 720p to 1440p with FSR and enable fullscreen: gamescope -h 720 -H 1440 -U -f