What is gamemode?

GameMode is a small background service for Linux that temporarily adjusts operating system settings to improve game performance, then restores everything to normal when the game closes. It was created by Feral Interactive, a company known for porting commercial games to Linux. When a game starts and requests GameMode, the service can switch the CPU to a high-performance power mode, raise the priority of the game process so the processor spends more time on it, and boost GPU performance on Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. It can also inhibit the screensaver while gaming, adjust I/O priority, and run custom scripts before or after a session. All changes are temporary and reversed when the game exits. You can trigger GameMode in a few ways. Some games and launchers already include built-in support and activate it automatically. For others, you prefix the launch command with "gamemoderun" in a terminal, or add it to Steam's launch options with "gamemoderun %command%". A configuration file lets you customize which optimizations run, including GPU overclocking parameters for Nvidia cards. GameMode ships as a prebuilt package in most major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Gentoo, so most users can install it without compiling anything. Building from source requires a C development environment, the meson build tool, and the systemd messaging library. The project is structured so the background daemon and the client-side library are separate pieces. This means a game that links against the GameMode client library will still launch safely even if the daemon is not installed or running on the system. It is maintained by Feral Interactive and open-source contributors.