Feral's GameMode 1.8 Adds CPU Core Pinning & Parking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Feral's GameMode 1.8 Adds CPU Core Pinning & Parking

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Feral-GameMode-1.8-Released

[darkbasic]

Michael could you test this with your AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D please? Thank you

[Quackdoc]

one thing i've wanted to try and test is running the OS on all but 4 cores for a game, or running OS and game on all but 4 cores to allot to something like a video encoder, this is important because something like svtav1 will criple a lower end PC if you use it while gaming and doing other stuff.

[user1]

Does this still give any noticeable advantage over setting the power profile to "performance" in Gnome and KDE?

Ever since Gnome and KDE introduced the option to set the power profile via the gui, I felt like gamemode became kinda useless to me.

[rabcor]

Michael could you test this with your AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D please? Thank you

fresh gamemode test would indeed be nice, been a while, i seen old ones and it made a difference, heard people say it makes less difference today but never seen enough benchmarks to prove it, so i just assume it's probably still helping.

Does this still give any noticeable advantage over setting the power profile to "performance" in Gnome and KDE?

Ever since Gnome and KDE introduced the option to set the power profile via the gui, I felt like gamemode became kinda useless to me.

It should, it does a lot more than just changing the power profile to performance, but if there's one thing that'll ever boost ur performance it's doing that, any boosts beyond that are likely usually not gonna be very big, but every frame counts.

[panikal]

Does this still give any noticeable advantage over setting the power profile to "performance" in Gnome and KDE?

Ever since Gnome and KDE introduced the option to set the power profile via the gui, I felt like gamemode became kinda useless to me.

From their github:

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)
• CPU core pinning or parking
• Custom scripts

new system + old games makes this not so helpful - but if you are borderline on requirements, or want to do things like stop sql or docker or turn on overclocking and off after you're done without having to manually run a script or write your own, this is a quick solution.

[HellToupee]

I found very handy for screensaver inhibiting, eg playing yuzu with gamepad screen would often sleep, also used to run a script setting more aggressive fan profile.

[jonix]

one thing i've wanted to try and test is running the OS on all but 4 cores for a game, or running OS and game on all but 4 cores to allot to something like a video encoder, this is important because something like svtav1 will criple a lower end PC if you use it while gaming and doing other stuff.

This is something I also wanted to try, I also believe that this is similar to what intel is doing on the new APO windows thing. But I don't believe that is easy to do IRL, since you need to pin every process and I don't think you can prevent the kernel from running in some cores. But I bet that, at minimum, we should see better responsivity in games.

[Quackdoc]

This is something I also wanted to try, I also believe that this is similar to what intel is doing on the new APO windows thing. But I don't believe that is easy to do IRL, since you need to pin every process and I don't think you can prevent the kernel from running in some cores. But I bet that, at minimum, we should see better responsivity in games.

we could do it with cpusets which I think is what feral is kind of doing now?