Gamemode

Gamemode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.

Installation

Install gamemode and lib32-gamemode.

Configuration

Create and configure a gamemode.ini file. An example gamemode.ini file can be found here. Save it in /etc/, $HOME/.config/ or /usr/share/gamemode/.

You may want to make sure that desiredgov is set to performance and maybe increase the renice to 10 or so for higher priority for your game.

Note that this package comes with a drop-in file etc/security/limits.d/10-gamemode.conf that allows for the renicing feature to work. If you wish to have gamemode renice game processes, you will want to create and join the gamemode group.

Also, to change the AMD GPU performance level a Kernel parameter is possibly required. See AMDGPU#Boot parameter [1].

Usage

Verify if the settings in the configuration file are working:

$ gamemoded -t

To run games with gamemode start it like this:

$ gamemoderun ./game

When you have started your game you can verify that gamemode is running with the command:

$ gamemoded -s

Note: The gamemoded.service user unit is started on demand by dbus [2].

Steam

To make sure Steam starts a game with gamemode, right click the game, select Properties..., then Launch Options and enter:

gamemoderun %command%