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Make your Linux games go brrr

Enables Linux games written in Zig to request gamemode be enabled, opting in to various CPU, GPU, and kernel optimizations. If the user’s machine doesn’t have gamemode, it simply does nothing. There are no dependencies and your game will still run without it normally.

This is preferred as it means your game will automatically invoke gamemode for the user when running, rather than them having to manually enable it.

What is Linux GameMode?

Used by titles such as DiRT 4, many Tomb Raider and Total War games, 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, 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

GameMode packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, Solus, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia and possibly more.

Getting started

Create a build.zig.zon in your project (replace LATEST_COMMIT with the latest commit hash):

.{
    .name = "mypkg",
    .version = "0.1.0",
    .dependencies = .{
        .mach_gamemode = .{
            .url = "https://pkg.machengine.org/mach-gamemode/LATEST_COMMIT.tar.gz",
        },
    },
}

Run zig build in your project, and the compiler will instruct you to add a .hash = "..." field next to .url:

note: expected .hash = "12209838fcfb7a77d2d6931efdc7448c033a1b7dad11d082c94bbeeba9d1038cd311",

Then use the dependency in your build.zig:

pub fn build(b: *std.Build) void {
    ...
    exe.addModule("mach-gamemode", b.dependency("mach_gamemode", .{
        .target = target,
        .optimize = optimize,
    }).module("mach-gamemode"));
}

You can now use it in your src/main.zig file and use it:

const gamemode = @import("mach-gamemode");

Usage

The API is incredibly simple, when you want to start/stop gamemode simply call the function:

gamemode.start();
gamemode.stop();

No errors are returned; mach-gamemode generally stays silent. If users don’t have gamemode, or the platform is not linux, then nothing happens. Only if you have gamemode will it be enabled.

One can check programatically if gamemode is active using gamemode.isActive().

Ran into trouble?

Triple-check you followed the build.zig.zon instructions correctly, it’s easy to mess that part up.

Feel free to join the Mach Discord community for help.