Gamemode

Gamemode is a daemon and library 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

Gamemode is configured via the following files, which are read and then merged in the following order:

1. /etc/gamemode.ini for system-wide configuration;
2. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gamemode.ini for user-local configuration;
3. ./gamemode.ini for directory-local configuration.

Tip: An example configuration file with comments can be found on FeralInteractive's GitHub.

Note: /usr/share/gamemode/gamemode.ini should not be created by users, as it's reserved for manual configuration by package maintainers. See file-hierarchy(7) for more details.

Renicing

Gamemode can optionally adjust the priority of game processes (see ) to beyond the regular user lower limit of .

This is controlled by the following configuration option:

Unlike renicing a process with the command, Gamemode uses a positive value and negates it before applying it to the process, ie, a value of will renice the game process to -10.

This feature requires the user to be in the gamemode user group to work.

Overclocking

Gamemode can optionally overclock your GPU when it is running, but requires special configuration on part of the user.

Independently of the used GPU, the and configuration options must be set appropriately.

AMD

To alter the performance level of AMD GPUs, overclocking must be manually enabled, and the configuration option must be set.

NVIDIA

To alter the performance level of NVIDIA GPUs, overclocking must be manually enabled, and the , , and the configuration options must be set.

Usage

Test configuration

Verify if the settings in the configuration file are working:

$ gamemoded -t

Run a single game

To run a game with gamemode start it like this:

$ gamemoderun ./game

Use with MangoHud

See MangoHud#Use with Gamemode

Verify that gamemode is running

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

$ gamemoded -s

Run a single Steam game

To make Steam start a game with gamemode, right click the game in the Library, select Properties..., then in the Launch Options text box enter:

gamemoderun %command%

Run Steam with gamemode

To avoid having to change launch options for all Steam games, you may launch Steam directly with gamemode:

$ gamemoderun steam-runtime

The downside of this approach is that gamemode will be running for as long as the Steam process is open, instead of only when a game is opened.