Jason Ekstrand 688373a260 Add an option for using a different governor for integrated GPUs
This commit adds two new configuration options: igpu_desiredgov and
igpu_power_threshold which allow for a different CPU governor when the
Intel integrated GPU is under load.  This currently only applies to
Intel integrated GPUs and not AMD APUs because it uses the Intel RAPL
infrastructure for getting power information.  If on a platform that
without an Intel integrated GPU or where the kernel does not support
RAPL, the new options will be ignored and it will fall back to the old
behavior.

One of the core principals of gamemoded to date has been that, when
playing a game, we want to use the "performance" CPU governor to
increase CPU performance and prevent CPU-limiting.  However, when the
integrated GPU is under load, this can be counter-productive because the
CPU and GPU share a thermal and power budget.  By throwing the CPU
governor to "performance" game mode currently makes the CPU frequency
management far too aggressive and it burns more power than needed.  With
a discrete GPU, this is fine because the worst that happens is a bit
more fan noise.  With an integrated GPU, however, the additional power
being burned by the CPU is power not available to the GPU and this can
cause the GPU to clock down and lead to significantly worse performance.

By using the "powersave" governor instead of the "performance" governor
while the integrated GPU is under load, we can save power on the CPU
side which lets the GPU clock up higher.  On my Razer Blade Stealth 13
with an i7-1065G7, this improves the performance of "Shadow of the Tomb
Raider" by around 25-30% according to its internal benchmark mode.
2020-01-09 10:49:19 -06:00
2019-10-21 16:20:22 +02:00
2018-05-16 17:06:43 +01:00
2019-08-11 10:14:46 +01:00
2019-07-21 10:24:18 +01:00
2019-03-14 16:59:30 +00:00

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.

GameMode was designed primarily as a stop-gap solution to problems with the Intel and AMD CPU powersave or ondemand governors, but is now host to a range of optimisation features and configurations.

Currently GameMode includes support for optimisations including:

  • CPU governor
  • I/O priority
  • Process niceness
  • Kernel scheduler (SCHED_ISO)
  • Screensaver inhibiting
  • GPU performance mode (NVIDIA and AMD), GPU overclocking (NVIDIA)
  • Custom scripts

GameMode packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, Solus, the AUR, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia and possibly more.

Issues with GameMode should be reported here in the issues section, and not reported to Feral directly.


Requesting GameMode

For games/launchers which integrate GameMode support (see list later on), simply running the game will automatically activate GameMode.

For others, you must manually request GameMode when running the game. This can be done by launching the game through gamemoderun:

gamemoderun ./game

Or edit the Steam launch options:

gamemoderun %command%

Note: for older versions of GameMode (before 1.3) use this string in place of gamemoderun:

LD_PRELOAD="$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so.0"

Please note the backslash here in \$LIB is required.


Configuration

The daemon is configured with a gamemode.ini file. example/gamemode.ini is an example of what this file would look like, with explanations for all the variables.

Config files are loaded and merged from the following directories, in order:

  1. /usr/share/gamemode/
  2. /etc/
  3. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME/.config/
  4. $PWD

Note for Hybrid GPU users

It's not possible to integrate commands like optirun automatically inside GameMode, since the GameMode request is made once the game has already started. However it is possible to use a hybrid GPU wrapper like optirun by starting the game with gamemoderun.

You can do this by setting the environment variable GAMEMODERUNEXEC to your wrapper's launch command, so for example GAMEMODERUNEXEC=optirun or GAMEMODERUNEXEC="env DRI_PRIME=1". This environment variable can be set globally, so that the same prefix command does not have to be duplicated everywhere you want to use gamemoderun.

GameMode will not be injected to the wrapper.


Apps with GameMode integration

Games

The following games are known to integrate GameMode support (meaning they don't require any additional configuration to activate GameMode while running):

  • DiRT 4
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider
  • Total War: Three Kingdoms
  • Total War: WARHAMMER II
  • Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia

Others

Other apps which can integrate with GameMode include:

  • GNOME Shell (via extension) - indicates when GameMode is active in the top panel.
  • Lutris - Enables GameMode for all games by default if available (must have both 32- and 64-bit GameMode libraries installed), configurable in preferences.

Development Build Status

The design of GameMode has a clear-cut abstraction between the host daemon and library (gamemoded and libgamemode), and the client loaders (libgamemodeauto and gamemode_client.h) that allows for safe use without worrying about whether the daemon is installed or running. This design also means that while the host library currently relies on systemd for exchanging messages with the daemon, it's entirely possible to implement other internals that still work with the same clients.

See repository subdirectories for information on each component.

Install Dependencies

GameMode depends on meson for building and systemd for internal communication. This repo contains a bootstrap.sh script to allow for quick install to the user bus, but check meson_options.txt for custom settings.

Ubuntu/Debian (you may also need dbus-user-session)

apt install meson libsystemd-dev pkg-config ninja-build git libdbus-1-dev

Arch

pacman -S meson systemd git dbus

Fedora

dnf install meson systemd-devel pkg-config git dbus-devel

Gentoo

Gentoo has an ebuild which builds a stable release from sources. It will also pull in all the dependencies so you can work on the source code.

emerge --ask games-util/gamemode

You can also install using the latest sources from git:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="**" emerge --ask ~games-util/gamemode-9999

Build and Install GameMode

Then clone, build and install a release version of GameMode at 1.4:

git clone https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode.git
cd gamemode
git checkout 1.4 # omit to build the master branch
./bootstrap.sh

To uninstall:

systemctl --user stop gamemoded.service
cd build/
ninja uninstall

Pull Requests

Pull requests must match with the coding style found in the .clang-format file, please run this before committing:

clang-format -i $(find . -name '*.[ch]' -not -path "*subprojects/*")

Maintained by

Feral Interactive

See the contributors section for an extended list of contributors.


License

Copyright © 2017-2019 Feral Interactive

GameMode is available under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause License (Revised)

The "inih" library is distributed under the New BSD license

Description
Optimise Linux system performance on demand
Readme 1.4 MiB
Languages
C 90%
Meson 5.5%
Roff 2.9%
Shell 1.6%