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Linux

Info

These instructions are only for Linux systems.

Kernel

Try a desktop-oriented kernel like XanMod or linux-tkg.

cpupower

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

Info

GameMode will set the CPU governor to performance automatically while playing TF2.

GameMode

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

To run TF2 using GameMode through Steam launch options, open Steam, then:

  1. Navigate to Library -> right-click Team Fortress 2 -> Properties -> General -> Launch Options.
  2. Enter gamemoderun %command% -your -tf2 -launch -options -go -here

If launching TF2 from Lutris, “Enable Feral GameMode” is likely enabled by default, hence the Launch Options additions aren’t used. You can check in Lutris via:

  • Games -> right-click Team Fortress 2 -> Configure -> System options

irqbalance

Balance IRQ interrupts across multiple cores by installing the irqbalance package on your distro and then enabling the irqbalance.service, likely by sudo systemctl enable --now irqbalance.service. This package is installed on most Debian-based OS by default, like Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Networking optimization

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

I/O Schedulers

The Linux kernel supports multiple I/O scheduler algorithms for storage devices such as mq-deadline, bfq, and kyber. Depending on the type and speed of your storage device, some of these algorithms may increase or decrease the latency of read requests, as well as overall throughput. See the Arch Linux wiki for more information.

Virtual memory optimization

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

Tuned

Tuned is a profile-based optimization daemon by Red Hat. Install it for your distro and run tuned-adm profile latency-performance to apply the latency-performance profile. You can view a list of all available profiles with tuned-adm list. For more information, view the Red Hat sysadmin article.

Game crashes when using a NVIDIA card

There have been issues reported by users with NVIDIA driver versions between 525.60.11 and 525.89.02-1 that cause the game to crash on startup. This was the result of a bug in NVIDIA’s driver, which was fixed in 530.41.03. If unable to upgrade to this version, downgrading to 520.56.60 or lower is also an option.