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

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 :/

Are you sure it is owned by root?
chown root script.sh

A plasmoid to change the CPU governor doesn't seem a bad idea, I might look into that.

Running AMD CPU/APU's i have always turned of Turbo mode in the BIOS and cool & quiet.

How do you do this? Entering bios with F2 during boot, I see no option to turn Turbo on/off. Perhaps it is not supported by my "AMD A8-6410 with Radeon R5 Graphics (up to 2.4ghz)". However, in bios it says that my computer has only 2000mhz cpu freq, so clearly the CPU is not turboin :P

I have the settings in BIOS

My CPU has a turbo of 4.2ghz and a base clock of 3.8. I just disable turbo and increase the multiplyer to give me a constant 4.2 ghz. I found that in particular source engine games would stutter more and jump in FPS with the CPU switching between its core clock speed steps. If i get ryzen i probably shouldnt have to worry as much given that there will always be enough base line performance for source engine games and that titles are now moving to more GPU orientated APi's.

A couple of months ago saw this article on the Steam forums addressing the same issue, with another tweaks too, and it's what I use. I believe it's basically cpufrequtils with a script to switch performance mode on and off.

Seems reddit doesn't agree with me on this article.

Note to self: Don't read reddit.

Seems reddit doesn't agree with me on this article.

Note to self: Don't read reddit.

This is such a boring trend among developers in general, the response to any user tweaks is always "nooeee dont tinker with our perfectly logical programs, just spend hours replacing your tuned ubuntu with the utter standard, wash your hands, then start the game and get all these logs and send them to me so that I can ask you to do it all again for reproducability. THEN we might file a bug that will sit in some list for a year. Have fun.". Yeyeye that's all rational and stuff, but I think they get blinded by their own position as computer experts, computers is essentially mumbo jumbo magic IMO, like other complex stuff humans deal with. Things just work, and they are generally too complex/contingent/systemic for any person to understand, so people tinker and code away and sometimes it just works. Trying to force it to be rational and understandable is just too time consuming when users can get improvements with random tweaks.

As long as it doesn't break anything, let us play with irrational tweaks and pray to the CPU gods like we want.

I covered this in my blog.

https://orkultus.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/getting-full-performance-out-of-your-intel-cpu-in-ubuntu/

-Orkultus-

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've always set 'performance' for gaming. I have an i7 and just use an alias along the lines of 'sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance' with the corresponding allowance in sudoers - '/usr/bin/cpupower frequency-set -g performance', so no password entering every time. Plus the same for 'powersave'.

[quote=fabertawe]

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 :/

That workaround is echo (password) | sudo -S /usr/bin/scale.sh performance

Or you can install indicator-cpufreq, which provides a dropdown menu on your task bar to select the frequency and govern speeds of your processor.

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 :/

Are you sure it is owned by root?
chown root script.sh

A plasmoid to change the CPU governor doesn't seem a bad idea, I might look into that.

Yup: [cybolic:~] $ cat .local/bin/set_cpu_scheduler.sh 
#!/usr/bin/bash
exec cpupower frequency-set -rg "$1" 
[cybolic:~] $ sudo chown root .local/bin/set_cpu_scheduler.sh 
[cybolic:~] $ sudo chmod u+s .local/bin/set_cpu_scheduler.sh 
[cybolic:~] $ ls .local/bin/set_cpu_scheduler.sh -l
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 54 Mar 23 18:11 .local/bin/set_cpu_scheduler.sh
[cybolic:~] $ set_cpu_scheduler.sh performance
Subcommand frequency-set needs root privileges


Last edited by Cybolic on 23 Mar 2017 at 4:16 pm UTC

Thanks a lot for bringing this up, Liam! I hope there will be some solutions (in whichever software/layer) to address this automatically in the future. Until then this is really something to take into account when gaming on Linux.

Concerning setuid on Scripts. This should *not* work on any recent Linux system, as it provides an even larger possible security vulnerability than setuid is to begin with. For details see here:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part4/section-7.html

Regarding the frequency governers for Intel CPUs:

These governors are *not* comparable to the regular pstate driver for Linux (e.g. used on older Intel Cores and AMD Cores). Intel implements its own policies in the driver that are independent of the cpufreq policies. Thus cpufreq policies will *not* work as expected. Details can be found here:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/intel-pstate.txt

This driver especially does *not* honor additional cpufreq settings apart from max_freq / min_freq.

I did some more testing, and for my system I get up to 50% more FPS! This is something SIGNIFICANT especially if you have a bunch of cores to load up. OnDemand was my system default:

Total War:Attila:
OnDemand: 22.7 Ave FPS, Performance: 33.9 Ave FPS
Total War:Warhammer:
OnDemand: 57.7 Ave FPS, Performance: 74.0 Ave FPS
CoH2:
OnDemand: 27.8 Ave FPS, Performance: 49.2 Ave FPS
Dirt Rally:
OnDemand: 51.6 Ave FPS, Performance: 101.3 Ave FPS
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided:
OnDemand: 40.6 Ave FPS, Performance: 50.5 Ave FPS

Edit: Better layout.


Last edited by FredO on 23 Mar 2017 at 6:27 pm UTC

[quote=buenaventura]I [quote=Eike]

shedutil <--- INTRUIGING, what is this? I google and it seems like some newfangled stuff? I wonder if that will be even better than Performance!

Still, why does it only go up to 2,00ghz? Says right on the sticker on my lappy "up to 2.4 ghz", bullshiet :P

If you want to use the 2.4GHz with schedutil governor add intel_pstate=passive in the boot kernel line. I'm using it and my hasswell cpu in the laptop has lower temperature than using only intel_pstate (powersave / performance) when there's not much load.

[quote=qgnox][quote=buenaventura]I

shedutil <--- INTRUIGING, what is this? I google and it seems like some newfangled stuff? I wonder if that will be even better than Performance!

Still, why does it only go up to 2,00ghz? Says right on the sticker on my lappy "up to 2.4 ghz", bullshiet :P

If you want to use the 2.4GHz with schedutil governor add intel_pstate=passive in the boot kernel line. I'm using it and my hasswell cpu in the laptop has lower temperature than using only intel_pstate (powersave / performance) when there's not much load.

Well my CPU is an AMD A8-6410, so I guess I can't do that right?

I still wonder how I can get it to be 2.4 and not just 2. You would think that that would make a difference.

I think that's nothing only related to Linux. I did some gaming on my father's laptop for a while. And without setting it to performance I had games running very poorly.
But I always had the CPU-Indicator in Ubuntu and therefore never had troubles changing it. I also do it for other CPU intensive stuff. I still have to take a closer look at schedutil.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/intel-pstate.txt

plain text in 2017? common! i'm a human being! i hate being Treated as a machine!

plain text in 2017? common! i'm a human being! i hate being Treated as a machine!

Feel free to register unreadablecrap.com and publish there all the documentation you can find in an unreadable tiny font with a choice of colors that makes the readers blind within five minutes.

why? they already did that with this plaintext.

plain text in 2017? common! i'm a human being! i hate being Treated as a machine!

Feel free to register unreadablecrap.com and publish there all the documentation you can find in an unreadable tiny font with a choice of colors that makes the readers blind within five minutes.

why? they already did that with this plaintext.

The display of plain text is up to your browser/you. Some Strg-+ makes it already look nicer here.

This is in fact some serious thing. Never thought that my CPU is not working at it's best. My i5 6600K is showing all the time that it's using „powersave“. I tried my own game I'm developing in UE4 and it's using 40% of all 4 cores all the time with „powersave“. When I switch to „performance“, it's using ~23% of all 4 cores. This CPU is really fast, and it's impossible to really force it to use all the cores to 100% in ordinary tasks except when I'm compiling things. I tested it, and it's never switching to „performance“ without command and I find this stupid. Does this mean that all the benchmarks of games were actually incorrect? I mean Windows vs Ubuntu (or Linux in general..)?