Modern games in ultra 2K quality on qubes? It's more likely than you think!

General Discussion
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18

Okay so it’s been a year and I still haven’t written that post…

It’s going to be a long one, so while I keep putting it off for later, I’ll give a quick summary of what works in terms of performance for me:

Certainly helpful

  1. Disable kernel modesetting
  2. Install nvidia drivers, especially ones newer than in Debian 13 repos
  3. Fix your thermals (hardware, PTM pads, sealed laptop cooling pads, water cooling)
  4. Fix your thermals (software, reduce CPU load, get VMs off of P-cores)
  5. Pin your gaming VM to p-cores
  6. Pin all your other VMs to e-cores
  7. Reduce core counts for your other VMs
  8. Increase credit2-weight of your gaming VM (only useful under heavy system load)
  9. Disable display compositing in dom0
  10. Disable VSync in games
  11. Pass your NVME/SSD partition directly to your gaming qube. If using NTFS, use the new NTFS driver in linux (ntfs3) instead of the old one, which still gets used as the default when mounting.
  12. Don’t try using 4K, unless you have a beast of a GPU and CPU. Keep to 2K or 1080p.
  13. Experiment with xenpm power management
  14. Use vulkan shader pre-caching (Steam)

Possibly helpful

  1. Reduce SSD writes (volatile journal, volatile /tmp and ~/.cache)
  2. Set noatime for most of your filesystems
  3. Disable unneeded systemd services
  4. Use zram
  5. Don’t use high polling rates for your gamepad (maybe also mouse/keyboard)
  6. Use the Wine virtual desktop (or Gamescope, if you can make it work)
  7. Keep vCPU0 in the gaming VM for IRQs, not the game processes

Some of the tweaks can be applied with the help of my scripts: GitHub - Atrate/qubes-utils: Meta-repo to provide links to Qubes utilities I've written · GitHub

(@neowutran you mentioned you’d like to be notified)