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.

  • sasalzig
    3·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • isleofmist
    2·
    3 years ago

    I think integrated graphics are particularly bad for gamemode. I now avoid it after trying it out and not seeing much benefit.