Gaming and Emulation

Gaming and Emulation

SkillFishOS ships the tools, not the games — you bring your own games and ROMs.

PC gaming

• Steam (+ Big-Picture), Heroic (Epic/GOG), Proton — GE-Proton 11 installed and set as the default for both from the Control Center's Games section.
• Our own Mesa build: RADV with compute queues and FSR 4 support, applied per launcher or system-wide (system-wide needs the SkillFishOS kernel). FSR 4 is enabled per game through OptiScaler; gamescope's own FSR 1 / NIS upscaling is still there too.
• gamescope, GameMode (arming the scx_bpfland scheduler), MangoHud for the on-screen overlay.

CPU vs GPU bound

Some titles — like Black Myth: Wukong gameplay — are CPU/draw-call bound: FPS don't scale with resolution or GPU clock. There, CPU stability and good cooling matter more than GPU clock. Other workloads (and the Wukong benchmark flythrough) are GPU-bound and benefit from a higher ceiling — the Control Center Tuner section's Performance preset. See GPU Governor and Tuning and Benchmarks.

Console mode

The Control Center's Console section launches Steam Big Picture inside gamescope right now; skillfish-console also adds a "SkillFishOS Console (Big Picture)" entry on the SDDM login screen for booting straight into it, SteamOS-style. Quitting Steam returns to the login screen. Session log: ~/.local/state/skillfish-console.log. Resolution/refresh can be overridden with GAMESCOPE_W/H/R.

Emulation

• EmuDeck to install and configure emulators in a few clicks.
• ES-DE (EmulationStation Desktop Edition) as the frontend.

Get the most out of it

• Pick a SkillFishOS Control Center Profile (Quiet/Balanced/Performance), or dial in a higher ceiling in the Tuner section for GPU-bound games, and keep the fan high.
• Unlock Compute Units (40-CU) for the extra compute throughput.
• Grow the Memory VRAM and GTT if a game wants more dedicated GPU memory.
• Use MangoHud to watch FPS and frametimes; the live HUD shows clocks/temps/power.

See also Troubleshooting for display/audio quirks (e.g. active DP→HDMI adapters can break audio).