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Feral Interactive Releases Tool for Linux Gamers to Optimize Their Gaming Rigs

It's available for free for gamers and game developers

Apr 10, 2018 12:04 GMT  ·  By
GameMode tool
   GameMode tool

Feral Interactive has released today an open-source tool for Linux gamers that promises to optimize their computers for the best possible gaming performance automatically.

The tool is called GameMode, it's free for gamers and game developers alike, and it consists of a daemon and library combo that allows you to set various performance optimizations to be temporarily applied to your Linux-powered gaming computer before attempting to play a game.

Developed in collaboration with Solus Project's Ikey Doherty, the GameMode tool appears to be able to only set the CPU governor, but Feral Interactive plans to extend it with extra mode-switch plugins, along with user configuration for local mode-switch plugins, better client state tracking, and an API to query the tool's active state.

"GameMode was designed primarily as a stop-gap solution to problems with the Intel and AMD CPU powersave or ondemand governors, but is intended to be expanded beyond just CPU governor states, as there are a wealth of automation tasks one might want to apply," said Feral Interactive.

Here's how to use GameMode to optimize your Linux gaming rig

If you're an avid Linux gamer, you probably already have a bunch of optimizations on your gaming rig for the best possible gaming performance, but newcomers could use Feral Interactive's GameMode tool to instruct the CPU of their computers to run in Performance Mode when playing games.

To do that, you'll first have to install GameMode on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution following the installation instruction provided by Feral Interactive on GitHub, until native Linux packages become available in the software repositories. After installation, you just have to run a game with one of the following commands (the second one is for Steam).

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so ./game LD_PRELOAD=$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so %command% Feral Interactive said that the first Linux game to integrate their GameMode tool would be Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is expected to launch this month. Most probably, all future game port released by the UK-based video games publisher will include the GameMode tool by default, but you can use it right now for a better gaming experience.