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# Gamemode

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From ArchWiki

Related articles

- MangoHud

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.

Add yourself to the `gamemode` user group. Without it, the gamemode user daemon will not have rights to change CPU governor or the niceness of processes.

## 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 renice(1)) to beyond the regular user lower limit of `0`.

This is controlled by the following configuration option:

    [general]
    renice=0

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

### 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 `apply_gpu_optimizations` and `gpu_device` configuration options must be set appropriately.

#### AMD

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

#### NVIDIA

To alter the performance level of NVIDIA GPUs, overclocking must be manually enabled, and the `nv_powermizer_mode`, `nv_core_clock_mhz_offset`, and the `nv_mem_clock_mhz_offset` 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

Note: The `gamemoded.service` user unit is started on demand by dbus [1].

### 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.

Category:

- Gaming