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.
• gamescope with FSR 1 / NIS upscaling, GameMode, MangoHud for the on-screen overlay.
• Vulkan via the RADV driver on the Cyan Skillfish GPU.

FSR 4 is not available — it's RDNA 4 hardware. Use gamescope (FSR1/NIS) or per-game OptiScaler for upscaling.

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 the Tuner's Performance GPU Governor and Tuning. See Benchmarks.

Console mode

Install skillfish-console and a "SkillFishOS Console (Big Picture)" entry appears on the SDDM login screen: it boots straight into Steam's gamepad UI inside gamescope, 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

• Set a profile in the SkillFishOS Tuner (Performance/Turbo), pick Performance governor mode 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).