The Latest Happenings With Feral's GameMode For Optimized Linux Gaming

It's been nearly one year since Feral Interactive introduced GameMode for optimizing the Linux gaming experience/performance. With not hearing anything out of the project in a while, I decided to poke around its development code this weekend.

GameMode's inaugural feature was switching to the P-State/CPUFreq "performance" governor when games are running rather than the common ondemand/powersave defaults on most Linux distributions. For many games this can help the performance both with AMD and Intel processors.

GameMode later picked up soft real-time capabilities and support for adjusting the I/O priority for games.

But it's been a few months since hearing anything significant out of the GameMode open-source initiative and even their Git code master branch hasn't seen any new merges since the middle of December. When going through some of the earlier commits as well as pending merge requests, some of the recent activities include:

- Support for being able to identify the game executables for Windows games running under Wine, rather than just picking up on the Wine binary itself. This obviously can help for per-game targeting of Wine (or Proton / Steam Play) games.

- Improved logging for GameMode.

- Bug fixes and other code refactoring improvements.

- Just this weekend is a pull request for allowing the screensaver to be inhibited using the D-Bus interface while games are running.

Other smaller work is also pending. The latest GameMode code can be tested via GitHub.