gamescope

Valve has truly headless runner (gamescope) for Linux, e.g. you can start it manually from command-line over ssh gamescope \ --backend headless \ -W 1920 -H 1080 \ -w 3840 -h 2160 \ -r 60 \ --cursor-scale-height 1080 \ --force-grab-cursor \ -- steam -gamepadui -pipewire-dmabuf You still need the initial setup for pairing. But it has many issues compared to Games on Whales, for example, which is much more efficient and scales cursor better. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

SteamOS and Bazzite both use Xwayland through gamescope which is the worst option as it seems https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope >Avoid XWayland. It added 3.13 ms of latency, more than all other effects combined.

Wayland is a protocol. Not a program. The top compositors right now for desktop are KDE Plasma, Hyprland, Gnome/Mutter and all of them implement the Wayland protocol independently. For game wrappers Valve makes Gamescope (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope) which is also a Wayland compositor. When you run a game through a wrapper like GameScope it will draw to the Wayland Server that GameScope is running and then that subsequently writes to the parent display server (which can actually be X or Wayland). Anyway it's a far superior and more secure protocol than whatever Windows is doing and you should for sure have ChatGPT explain it to you.

SteamOS recently shipped KDE with Wayland by default (for desktop mode). They have their own custom compositor for handheld-mode, named gamescope. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope?tab=readme-ov-fil... XWayland based.

Wayland crashes my kernel. If I want an uptime more than 24 hours I use X11 instead. Try running your app via gamescope https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

Some context for anyone unfamiliar with the linux desktop space: Hyprland is a "wayland compositor" (roughly analogous to an X Window Manager) that is under active community development: https://hypr.land Wayland is considered the future of the linux desktop and is what projects like Valve's SteamDeck are using: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope It's known that Hyprland Premium is going to include a bunch of pre-made dotfiles including a Quickshell bar config, if you want to see the current top-tier rice: https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/

Although desktop GPU plane counts are much more limited, it's not as restricted as you're portraying. Here's the AMD SoC in the Steam Deck, for example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/blob/master/src/d... Even though it's only 3 planes, they are relatively feature-rich still. In a typical desktop UI that would indeed be primary, cursor, and video planes. But if the system cursor is hidden, such as in a game, that frees up a plane that can be used for something else - such as the aforementioned game.

Valve's gamescope addresses something that you don't seem to believe exist : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

They use a gamescope[1] session to achieve this. You could potentially do the same on dekstop, but it's painful. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope is the one actually competent wayland WM.

Huh, I didn't even realize MangoHUD can do frame limiting. I've always just used gamescope[0] for that. The latter is probably overkill if all you want to do is limit framerate though. [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

Wayland is the future. On a serious note, did you know you can boot to gamescope and have a steamdeck like experience on your computer? https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope FSR scaling and everything.

If a game doesn't work in Wayland, you could always launch it in gamescope[1], which AFAIR doesn't expose WAYLAND_DISPLAY by default, so games should treat it the same as an X11 desktop. [1]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/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.

The readme pretty much explains it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope