You will want to force your CPU into high performance mode for Vulkan games on Linux

I tested it, and it's never switching to „performance“ without command and I find this stupid.

That's how these settings are supposed to work, though: You decide about the governor (if you actually know about it), and the governor decides abotu you CPU speed. It doesn't magically switch governers, it magically switches speed (in the limits of what the governor is supposed to archive).

Does this mean that all the benchmarks of games were actually incorrect? I mean Windows vs Ubuntu (or Linux in general..)?

:-( I fear, rerunning some might be interesting...

*edit* If you do, don't forget to search for other possible optimizations in advance, like maybe this one: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/you-will-want-to-force-your-cpu-into-high-performance-mode-for-vulkan-games-on-linux.9369/comment_id=89164


Last edited by Eike on 24 Mar 2017 at 2:57 pm UTC

*edit* If you do, don't forget to search for other possible optimizations in advance, like maybe this one: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/you-will-want-to-force-your-cpu-into-high-performance-mode-for-vulkan-games-on-linux.9369/comment_id=89164

I do not do benchmarks at all, but someone should inform these guys that do it about this. nVidia GPUs are switching performance levels all the time like expected. I thought that with CPUs everything was the same...

nVidia GPUs are switching performance levels all the time like expected. I thought that with CPUs everything was the same...

But they do! Their performance levels are called Mhz, not governer.

But they do! Their performance levels are called Mhz, not governer.

I found something new which is also strange. When Ubuntu boot, for 2-3 minutes it shows that its in „performance“ mode. After that time, it switches to "powersave" and rest in that mode all the time.
This is seriously stupid whoever invented this. It should work automatically but it doesn't work at all.

I benchmarked Talos with all the governors on my Core i5 4690K, in Vulkan mode, on Linux 4.9.6 with nvidia 375.26.

Long story short:
- intel_pstate performance and powersave give the same framerate (76.5 FPS).
- acpi_cpufreq ondemand and conservative achieve the best performance (78.7 FPS).

Both CPU core 0 usage and GPU usage were 100% when I benchmarked in Ultra quality, but I tried again with the GPU Speed setting set to Medium to make sure the GPU wasn’t the bottleneck and still got the same framerate for intel_pstate performance and powersave (~240 FPS).
EDIT: I also tried the opposite, CPU Medium and GPU Ultra, again same framerate.

As for OpenGL all the governors gave the same framerate (55 FPS) except acpi_cpufreq powersave (29 FPS).

I have some mixed Intel results here showing that overall there's not much difference indeed in average FPS. http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1605221-DE-ALLGOVERN95
However, it can be a significant improvement in alleviating the stutter especially in not so demanding games (where the CPU gets down-clocked frequently).
Also it was something much more visibly on my previous AMD CPU.
Thing is, fiddling around with governors is not something that will give instant guaranteed boost in performance on every game and every CPU out there, but is something worth trying when you want to squeeze some more oomph from your CPU.

I wonder if this will fix the stuttering in Borderlands 2 even with gl threaded enabled. I guess there's only one way to find out...

I wonder if this will fix the stuttering in Borderlands 2 even with gl threaded enabled. I guess there's only one way to find out...

There's a short test here with my old AMD CPU (try to watch it in 1080p HD to see the graph more clearly):
View video on youtube.com

I wish there was a way to not have to put in my password on every change, maybe someone knows how to work around that?

You could give setuid a try. Make a shell script as root, and then: chmod u+s script.sh
You should be able to run it as a user with it's owner rights, which are root.

No go on my Arch system. I've also tried editing the sudoers config file with visudo and using sudo instead, but that still asks for a password :/

I don't know what the discussion is, but running scripts as root is easy:
You create a script that's owned by root in a directory that's only writeable by root (security).
In your script you do
if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]; then
exec sudo -u root "$0" "$@"
fi

In your sudoers file you can say:
<user> ALL = NOPASSWD: <full path of your script>

That's the easiest way to perform a script as root: make the script safe, and then hand out rights to users to run that script.

[...]
That's the easiest way to perform a script as root: make the script safe, and then hand out rights to users to run that script.

That's what I did, but for some reason it won't work with Argos. I assume it's due to per-terminal login / "tty_tickets", which I don't want to disable completely.

I tried this the other day when you posted it & the cpu kept overheating, turns out one of the clips that are supposed to hold the fan in place had broken & it wasn't sitting against the cpu so cooling wasn't happening at all, one refresh of the thermal paste & a new fan later & no more overheating, thanks to you Liam I got a potentially cpu threatening problem fixed. :D

I tried this the other day when you posted it & the cpu kept overheating, turns out one of the clips that are supposed to hold the fan in place had broken & it wasn't sitting against the cpu so cooling wasn't happening at all, one refresh of the thermal paste & a new fan later & no more overheating, thanks to you Liam I got a potentially cpu threatening problem fixed. :D

Cool!

... in both meanings of the word! :D

Cool!

... in both meanings of the word! :D

He didn't so much save my bacon as save my chips. ;)

AMD 8370 proc here running RadeonSI. I can't successfully run any of the above scripts, as I do not have that folder structure on my system (KDE Neon). My '/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/' folder is empty.

from an comunity on google Plus

"Jannis
I use a file in /etc/sudoers.d/ to allow commands I want to run with sudo from scripts without password:

# cat /etc/sudoers.d/20-customstuff
jannis ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/openvpn, /usr/bin/cpupower, /usr/local/bin/cryptmount.sh, /usr/bin/radeontop, /usr/bin/psd-overlay-helper, /usr/local/bin/emsync.sh

This allows to run certain commands or scripts with sudo without entering a password.

I put my custom scripts into /usr/local/bin/ as that's owned by root, in path variable, and won't conflict with the package manager. I also "chown root:root" and "chmod 755" my scripts to prevent privilege escalation.

Anyway, to toggle cpu governors, I made a small script¹ and set it to execute on keypress on one of the custom keys on my roccat keyboard. It uses /usr/bin/cpupower which is in the NOPASSWD line mentioned above.

¹ pastebin.com - [Bash] /usr/local/bin/toggleperformance - Pastebin.com
[Bash] /usr/local/bin/toggleperformance - Pastebin.com
[Bash] /usr/local/bin/toggleperformance - Pastebin.com
pastebin.com"

https://pastebin.com/vj6jD8bE

Thanks for the heads up, Liam. I made two files, called gov_perf and gov_psav and copied the short scripts into them, then made them executable and copied them to usr/bin. That way I can issue the commands from any directory with a single word typed. I'm sure I could add gov_perf to launcher scripts of games so that the process is auto-magic. Now to figure out a way to make games trigger gov_psav upon exit... 

You know you could add them as bash aliases as well? they would then work from terminal, tested & fully working here. :D

alias perform='echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor'Gives you performance &

alias demand='echo ondemand | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor'puts it back to ondemand.

put those lines in your .bash_aliases file & you're good to go.


Last edited by lucifertdark on 4 Apr 2017 at 5:38 pm UTC