You want gamemode

Was chasing down some odd graphics card behavior in Steam, ultimately traced to a corrupted config in Steam (my fault, swapping out too many different Proton-GE’s). Anyway, along the way, I finally got around to reading the documentation on gamemode. I only installed it because I needed it for Lutris but, as it turns out, it’s an instant graphics card upgrade. To illustrate, I have Borderlands 3 installed. This comes with a bench marking test. On “Ultra” settings, I was getting just under 63 FPS. With gamemode enabled, that jumped to a little over 77 FPS (almost 15 FPS gain). Updating my Borderlands 3 settings to maximum (“Badass”), I was still getting over 70 FPS. This is with the default gamemode settings. In Steam, all I had to do was add “gamemoderun %command%” to the launch options (no quotes).

…If you haven’t played around with gamemode…you want this.

Thanks for the tip! The Arch Wiki also mentions mangohud for added performance benefits. Have you tried it as well? My main (2) Proton games are Baldur’s Gate 3 and Path of Exile, both of which I have the settings turned all the way up without any noticeable issues; GPU is GTX 1660, not a monster by any stretch.

Have you tried either of these games?

Not super familiar with mangohud, but I think it just gathers data for you to use to tweak gamemode more safely. One thing I do use is the Hardware Sync plugin for Open RGB. The window in front of my graphics card is color coded to the GPU temperature and the CPU cooling fan is color coded to the CPU temperature. Not a precise as mangohud but, gives me a rough idea of how hard the CPU and GPU are working.

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Thanks - I will definitely give this a shot.