688373a260
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.
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="$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so.0"
Please note the backslash here in \$LIB is required.
Configuration
The daemon is configured with a gamemode.ini file. example/gamemode.ini is an example of what this file would look like, with explanations for all the variables.
Config files are loaded and merged from the following directories, in order:
/usr/share/gamemode//etc/$XDG_CONFIG_HOMEor$HOME/.config/$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 
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