Gaming
Setting up Steam, Proton, and gaming tooling on Genesi OS.
Genesi runs the CachyOS performance kernel, which makes it a solid gaming base. The fastest way to get set up is the Package Installer, which has a one-click gaming category. You can also install things manually:
sudo pacman -S steam lutris gamemodeThen, in Steam → Settings → Compatibility, enable Steam Play (Proton) for all titles.
Make sure your GPU drivers are set up first — see GPU Drivers. For laptops with two GPUs, see Dual GPU.
For Vulkan support you'll want the right driver packages:
# AMD
sudo pacman -S vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon
# Intel
sudo pacman -S vulkan-intel lib32-vulkan-intel
# NVIDIA: the nvidia-utils / lib32-nvidia-utils packages provide VulkanSqueezing more out of a busy machine
Studio Mode gives the whole machine to the running game: it pauses every other open app, forces the GPU to its performance level, and stops the game being paged out to swap.
Where that helps most is a machine with things running in the background — a browser with forty tabs, a chat client, a downloader. Expect the gain to show up in frame consistency and 1% lows rather than in average FPS: freeing CPU and RAM removes stutter, but it cannot make a GPU-bound title render faster. On an otherwise idle machine the game already had everything, so there is little left to win.
Add your voice-chat client to the exception list before a match, or Studio Mode
will pause it: genesi-studio set never_freeze=discord,spotify.
CachyOS's gaming guide and the Arch Wiki: Gaming go deeper on tuning, anti-cheat, and per-title tweaks.