How to get a stretched resolution in CS2 (and every Steam games) with gamescope

The first game I tried to play to monitor CachyOS performance was CS2. The game ran perfectly fine, so it was time to tweak it as I am used to.

I started to play video games on budgets PCs so I had to optimize everything I could to avoid every stutters, freezes or lags. This is why I always played CS2 with a stretched resolution, and I've never been able to go back to widescreen 16:9 resolution in this game.

After a bit of research, I found this video from LinuxNext :

He explains what is gamescope and how to use it to get a stretched resolution in Steam games. Developed by Valve, gamescope is a tool designed to encapsulate an app on a Steam Deck to give it advanced features - such as stretching the app.

Basically, all you have to do is to add gamescope as launch options with a few parameters.

Follow these steps to get started :

• Make sure gamescope is installed. On CachyOS, you can open Octopi and type "gamescope". I personally installed gamescope-nvidia while I was finding my way to stretch my game and it works so I didn't bother trying the original "gamescope".
• Go to your Steam Library, then right-click the game you want to configure and click on "Properties..."

• In the "General" tab, look for "Launch options" at the bottom and add this line :

gamescope -w 1920 -h 1440 -W 2560 -H 1440 -S stretch -f -r 170.0 --force-grab-cursor --adaptive-sync -- %command%

You will have to tweak these options with your needs. Basically, -w and -h are your in-game resolution, -W and -H are your real resolution, -S stretch will stretch the content to the -W and -H you specified. -f will put the game in fullscreen mode and -r is the refresh-rate of the monitor.

--force-grab-cursor will capture your mouse into the gamescope "container" (so it can avoid your mouse going on another screen causing the app to lose the focus) and --adaptative-sync can eliminate tearing on compatible screens.

Don't forget the end ! -- %command% will be executed by Steam to start the game. And that's it ! You can always find more options here : Gamescope Github.

Another guide will come soon to explain how to add some vibrance (saturation) in the game automatically when the game starts.

Thank you for reading !