I used gamemode because it seemed like a nice performance tool; however it caused performance, stability, and issues (in TeamF2). In TF2, I had irregular frame rates and frame times.
I decided to disable gamemode to see what would happen; because it’s a good idea to test every known factor. I got a consistent frame rate of 60fps and consistent frametime of 16.67ms.
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
Constantly changing the behavior of the CPU and priorities can be very bad for stability.
I think games should focus on optimizing their code, instead of relying on third party software.
Game boosters are known to be snake oil; FOSS game boosters are not an exception.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
- 0 users online
- 5 users / day
- 20 users / week
- 27 users / month
- 16 users / 6 months
- 20 subscribers
- 684 Posts
- 1.7K Comments
- Modlog
I think integrated graphics are particularly bad for gamemode. I now avoid it after trying it out and not seeing much benefit.
Yeah, looking at this list, there are multiple things that could cause worse outcomes in practice.
The most problematic IMHO are the I/O prio and niceness. This is because other processes like xorg and the compositor (and maybe even kernel threads, though not sure if you can starve those) need I/O and CPU too when running a game, and they get starved by the game hogging these resources. I remember when running the original StarCraft through wine you needed to de-nice it to avoid starving the X server of CPU.
Of course some of the other stuff is also sketchy since it could increase temps and therefore induce throttling. Depends on how good the cooling is I suppose.
A low latency scheduler can increase overhead and thus reduce average fps, but should not really increase stuttering (probably the opposite), so I don’t think that’s the problem really.
I wonder why
gamemodeis so popular that it gets included by default in Lutris and Ubuntu.