GameMode: Optimize your system to play your favorite titles

The British firm Feral Interactive released the open source software GameMode a few weeks ago, designed to speed up the running of modern games on operating systems of the Linux family.

The speed increase is achieved due to the automatic activation of the "Performance Mode" for the CPU during the start of the game. GameMode is a new option for Linux that will allow you to optimize your PC to play, which manages your system with a series of changes to its settings in order to optimize its performance during a video game session.

As is known, one of the common Linux problems is slowing down the CPU during gaming. GameMode allows you to solve this problem without having to perform a manual intervention in the configuration of the operating system.

About GameMode

GameMode allows you to change the behavior of the system when games start: the daemon takes care of changing the CPU governor to be in performance mode instead of the normal ondemand or powersave mode.

The design has a clear abstraction between the host daemon and the library ( gamemode and libgamemode) and customer chargers ( libgamemodeauto and gamemode_client.h) that allows 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 message exchange with the Daemon, it is entirely possible to implement other internal functions that still work with the same clients.

If you have a CPU, AMD and it has Cool'n'Quiet disabled, or you have an Intel CPU and it has SpeedStep disabled, the other, the GameMode governor will not work as your CPU does not work with a governor. You are already getting the most out of it.

How to install GameMode on Linux?

Due to the fact that it is a launch still in the testing phase in order to refine the details due to the large amount of hardware in which it can be used, we will hardly be able to find the application within the repositories of our system.

HoweverFirst of all, we must install some dependencies to guarantee a good operation of GameMode in our system.

In general, the required dependencies include meson pkg-config, the development libraries of systemd and ninja-build.

In the case of Debian, Ubuntu and distributions derived from these, we install the dependencies with this command
sudo apt-get install meson libsystemd-dev pkg-config ninja-build

For those who have installed ArchLinux, Manajaro or some derivative of these the dependencies are obtained with this command:
sudo pacman -S meson systemd ninja
While for Fedora, Korora, CentOS, openSUSE and derivatives we install with:

sudo dnf install meson systemd-devel pkg-config

Now we must download the source code of the application from its space in git, to do this on a terminal we execute this command:
git clone https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode.git
cd gamemode
git checkout 1.1
./bootstrap.sh
And now we must load the service to the system with these commands:
meson --prefix=/usr build -Dwith-systemd-user-unit-dir=/etc/systemd/user
cd build
ninja
sudo ninja install
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable gamemoded
systemctl --user start gamemoded
systemctl --user status gamemoded
Once you've installed it on your systems and they successfully loaded the service to it, you can tell any game that it can make use of GameMode by doing this command:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so ./game

You can also add it as a Steam launch option for each of your games, as follows:

LD_PRELOAD=$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so %command%

If you want to know which current CPU governor is in use, you can run this command in terminal:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Configuration

The daemon can be configured currently using file gamemode.ini, this is inside the application folder "example".

Configuration files are loaded and merged from the following directories, in order:
/usr/share/gamemode/
/etc/
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME o $HOME/.config/
$PWD
In this file we basically configure the governor and it provides us with a black list to exclude those games with which we do not want GameMode to run.