We all want to get the best performance out of our Linux games and Feral Interactive's GameMode tool continues to help towards this. While the initial release of GameMode was quite limited, they haven't stopped working on it.
They've just announced the release of GameMode 1.3, which adds in a bunch of pretty useful features including: disabling the screen-saver, a "gamemoderun" helper script to do the necessary setup (set LD_PRELOAD) to enable GameMode on games which do not support it themselves and increase I/O priority of game processes.
All of that sounds quite nice but there's two other pretty huge features added in this release. For those with either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU, there's now experimental overclocking/performance level configuration.
They also noted "Various other minor fixes and improvements". See the release notes on GitHub here.
I really hope this tool keeps on advancing, I've no doubt there's plenty more ways for them to keep pushing Linux gaming performance further to benefit everyone. The fact that Feral aren't keeping this for themselves, is also another reason to love what they do, it also means others can help make it even better like with this release having multiple authors.
One of the contributors, Marc Di Luzio, who previously worked for Feral Interactive and now Unity (while also doing tooling for Valve) teased on Twitter "More cool things to come, now that some foundations have been laid..." which sounds interesting.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Is this a tool for us users of for game developers?
For users (but game developers can activate it in their games).
Is this a tool for us users of for game developers?
It's for users. It tweaks your system settings temporarily to increase performance during gameplay.
Does it give any tangible performance improvements? I've known about it for a while, but never actually used it.
When activated it tweaks your machine for performance at the cost of power consumption. Like @mirv stated, it depends on the game and machine if usage yields measurable improvements. Gamemode is part of the standard Fedora repositories, I have installed it and modified all my steam launch commands to activate it automatically when starting a game.
I guess there is a reason that Feral recommends using it. The DXVK wiki also recommends to change to CPU governor (which is what gamemode does among others).
Last edited by jens on 16 March 2019 at 10:44 am UTC
I must have had my system all misconfigured because comparatively it was running pretty poorly for gaming. I haven't tested anything else yet as I only installed gamemode on saturday morning. Fixing wow was my big win for gamemode so I'm happy. I'll check out some of my native games in a bit and report back.
Right now I'm manually setting my CPU governor to performance before gaming and it almost always makes a difference, especially with Vulkan / DXVK / Proton (Fallout 4, Rise of the Tomb Raider...), but I'd like to check if the other alleged tweaks of gamemode can lead to even better performance.
For my part, the only reason I don't use this tool is because it relies on systemd (it kind of has to, but I use a different init system).It seems this is only because it uses sd-bus. The developers seem very open to pulling a change from anyone willing to implement an alternative. For you, it might be interesting to know that elogind also provides the sd-bus APIs, so you could try installing that. Patching the build system to build with elogind instead of systemd seems to be a one-line change.
Personally I'd be more interested to see what the actual changes the lib does, and just make those changes permanently to my system. CPU governor and kernel scheduler could be easy fixes at least.
Is there a way to globally activate gamemode?
I guess it should help to start your game starter(s) (e g. Steam) with game mode?
Personally I'd be more interested to see what the actual changes the lib does, and just make those changes permanently to my system. CPU governor and kernel scheduler could be easy fixes at least.
Sure, you can set e.g. your CPU governor to performance permanently, though the idea is to do this only when needed since it will effect your power consumption, system temperature and eventually fan speeds too.
The source is here https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode
The readme gives some indication what's actually happening behind the scenes.
If I have a beefy setup, should I bother with GameMode? It helped heaps with my low-tier setup, but I don't know if I'd be introducing unnecessary tear to my new parts.If you are doing any kind of Wine/Proton Gaming you should definitely try GameMode. It gives a lot of performance for most Blizzard Games for me (WoW, D3, SC), gives a good boost to Witcher 3, that were the games I was trying recently with GameMode.
Lutris has a handy switch for activating GameMode if you start a specific wine prefix, so it is also easy to use if you manage your wine games with Lutris.
If I have a beefy setup, should I bother with GameMode? It helped heaps with my low-tier setup, but I don't know if I'd be introducing unnecessary tear to my new parts.
I have a fairly beefy system and Gamemode is almost necessary for WINE/Proton gaming. Pure native games are ok, but since I figured out Gamemode I've been pretty much using it on all games.
just me findings. give it a try and see if it's worth it.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me