DOTA2: something beautiful has happened
Nvidia's new driver seems to perform very well in games that support Vulkan. Together with the CPU governor switched to "performance" mode, my old FX-4100 potato performs at unseen levels. I observed a sharp FPS increase of roughly 20% with new highs in the 120 fps area.
Mind you, I am not using a hardware screen recorder. My good old Simple Screen Recorder program (Linux opensource) did the job in the background (using Nvidia hardware acceleration though) and still the FPS are higher than they were ever before.
Games settings:
1080p, all options maxed out
Vulkan API
Hardware:
AMD [email protected]
NVIDIA GTX-1060, 3GB (GPU at 1.99GHz, VRAM at 8.4GHz)
16GB DDR3 RAM at roughly 1400MHz
Northbridge overclocked to roughly 2.3GHz
FSB slightly overclocked (207MHz)
Again: I could never reach this performance level even if my system was overclocked to higher clock speeds (i.e. 4.7GHz, 2.7GHz NB)
NVIDIA Driver Version used: 396.18 beta
Operating System: Kubuntu 17.10, kernel version 4.13.0-37
How to switch the Linux CPU governor to performance mode:
$ echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
How to switch back to power-save mode:
$ echo powersave | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
It seems the linux CPU governor cooperates with AMD's Cool & Quiet feature. When performance mode is turned on, the CPU doesn't downclock anymore. When powersave is turned on, the Cool & Quiet feature works again.
So in case your system is borderline oc'd (unstable), make sure to downclock it or improve CPU and case cooling before trying the performance mode (especially with RotTR which puts almost a 100% load on all 4 cores of my FX-4100 CPU).
Kudos to Feral Interactive, Crystal Dynamics (Rise of the Tomb Raider publisher) and their Linux port team and NVIDIA of course!
Rise of the Tomb Raider FAQs (more on the CPU governor):
https://support.feralinteractive.com/...
Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux review (buy this game!):
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/article...