Linux¶

Kernel¶

Try a desktop oriented kernel like Xanmod.

cpupower¶

Use either the performance, schedutil or ondemand governors when playing TF2 by using cpupower frequency-set -g performance, for example. You can see available governors for your CPU with cpupower frequency-info.

GameMode¶

GameMode is a handy utility released by Feral Interactive, which will change the CPU Governor from the default CPU governor to performance. Recent updates allow it to change a games’ “nice priority”, which will give the game more resources to work with.

irqbalance¶

Balance IRQ interrupts across multiple cores by installing the irqbalance package on your distro and enabling the irqbalance service. This package is installed on most debian-based OS’s by default, like Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Ananicy¶

You can install schedtool and Ananicy and enable the ananicy to get automatically applied ruled based process priority balancing to improve resources allocated to TF2.

Networking optimization¶

See the Arch Linux wiki for information about improving networking parameters for performance.

Virtual memory optimization¶

See the Arch Linux wiki for information about improving virtual memory parameters.

Native Libraries¶

The automatic Steam runtime host library pinning is not enough to use native libraries on TF2 as the TF2 launcher script shades in some libraries.

Go to TF2_FOLDER/bin and delete libSDL2-2.0.so.0, and libtcmalloc_minimal.so.4. Now, Team Fortress 2 will not be able to load these libraries. The system will have to provide them, so make sure you have the 32-bit/multilib versions of libtcmalloc and sdl2.