FastGame

This is a project I started for fun and for learning purposes. It allows the user to apply small system configuration tweaks that may(or may not) increase gaming performance. The kernel Process Events Connector is used to monitor creation and destruction of processes. When the kernel sends us the PID value of a recently created process we read the file /proc/PID/comm and if the process name matches the game executable name provided in the user interface a few settings are applied to the game process.

Application usage

When the window is opened it will show the value of the system parameters. This is a good momento to open our presets menu and saving the current settings in a profile named default or whatever name you prefer. This will make it easier to recover your system default settings while doing tests.

Once you have configured the parameters click on the Apply button in the window top left corner. After a few seconds an authentication window should be shown by your system. A few of the available settings can only be changed with root access. After authentication the settings that can be immediately applied will be applied. And a server that listen to the kernel Process Events Connector will be launched. this server applies to the game process settings like cpu affinity, priority scheduler, etc. It will be automatically finished once the main window is closed. So keep FastGame window open while playing!

If you want to apply environment variables it is necessary to launch the game with fastgame_launcher. In Steam all that you have to do is putting fastgame_launcher %command% in the launch options.

Features

First of all have in mind that there is no guarantee that the settings exposed by FastGame will improve your game performance. Think of FastGame as an easy way to test if they can help you. That being said these are the current settings that can be configured through FastGame:

• Set Environment variables
• Game cpu affinity configuration
• Change the cpu frequency governor
• Change the process niceness
• Use /dev/cpu_dma_latency to avoid deep C-States
• Apply the SCHED_BATCH priority scheduler to the game process
• Apply the SCHED_RR priority scheduler to the wineserver process
• Set the wineserver cpu affinity
• Change the disk scheduler
• Change the readahead and nr_requests values
• Disable the disk add_random
• Enable the disk write cache and disable APM
• Apply the Realtime IO priority to the game process
• Set amdgpu performance level, power cap and irq affinity
• Configure the virtual memory cache pressure
• Configure the virtual memory compaction proactiveness
• Configuring transparent hugepages
• Saving all the settings above to a preset file that can be easily loaded

Compilation

cd fastgame
meson build
cd build
ninja