How to use FSR on any Steam game with Gamescope

Tutorials and Tips
1

AMD FSR is an upscaling technology designed to run games at a low resolution and upscale them to achieve better performance without losing image quality.

Gamescope is a microcompositor to run a single program within with low latency and high performance, it was made for SteamOS but it can be run as a client on any normal Desktop Enviroment.

Recently an update to Gamescope included AMD FSR upscaling support. This update has now reached Flathub, allowing anyone to easily use FSR with any Steam game anywhere with Flatpak.

Step by Step Instructions

  • Install Flatpak and Flathub, you can follow the instructions for your distro on Flathub website. Note that you will need a minimum of Flatpak 1.12.x in order for this to work. (Note to Ubuntu 20.04 and derivatives users, you will need to use the PPA in the setup instructions, flatpak in universe will not work for this).

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    Here’s the CLI command if you prefer to do it that way: flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope

  • Setup Flatpak Steam with your account and install the desired games

  • Disable the Steam in game overlay in Settings → In Game → untick “Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game” as currently the Steam Overlay interferes with FSR.

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  • On the General tab of game properties, on launch options put a Gamescope command, example: gamescope -h 720 -H 1080 -U -f -- %command%. That will launch the game at 720p rescaled to 1080p in fullscreen. Most likely you will only need to change the resolutions, for more details as to how to configure Gamescope check out the README.

  • Next install Steam and Gamescope, searching for gamescope in gnome-software will show both, click on them to install them:

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  • Launch the game!

I strongly recommend the usage of fullscreen (-f flag), as I found Gamescope to introduce a lot of latency when running windowed.

Caveats:

  • I only tried on AMD GPUs, but it might work on Intel as well. Gamescope currently does not support NVidia cards.

TODO on this tutorial:

  • Gamescope is currently crashing on the latest update so this probably won’t work right now. (Does anyone know the log location?)
  • Looks like you need to disable the steam overlay and mangohud still?
  • If someone has a KDE Discover screenshot please edit this and insert it.
3 Likes
2

What about other flatpaks?
I think gamescope should be included as a Freedesktop extension and not just for steam. Other game launchers would benefit from this aswell

3

I’m not sure on the others, that might be worth reporting in the bug tracker for the gamescope flatpak perhaps? Ideally I’d love to have a post like this for integrating different gaming tools with other launchers, etc.

EDIT: Someone filed a similar request: https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.gamescope/issues/4

4

I can’t get it to work with org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.MangoHud installed, do you know of any way to solve this without having to remove the runtime?

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I still haven’t found a workaround to running both at the same time. :cry: