[Howto] Optimizing the performance of "Bard's Tale 4" on steam

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆

This guide will show you how to set up Manjaro for best performance for the game Bard’s Tale 4.

Game Mode Installation
Feral Games have made a nice little app that will tuning your Linux system for games. Fire up the konsole/terminal and type;

sudo pacman -S lib32-gamemode gamemode
systemctl --user enable gamemoded
systemctl --user start gamemoded

Now Feral’s Game Mode installed and ready to be used.

Installation of Steam
Installation of Steam is pretty simple, we will install both the native version and Manjaro version of Steam. You’ll never know when you need one or another for other games.

sudo pacman -S steam-manjaro steam-native linux-steam-integration
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libbz2.so.1.0.8 /usr/lib/libbz2.so.1.0.6
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libbz2.so.1.0.8 /usr/lib32/libbz2.so.1.0.6
/usr/bin/lsi-steam %U
/usr/bin/steam %U

Installation of Bard’s Tale 4
Now install Bard’s Tale 4 - It’s around 35 GB download. If possible install the BT4 on SSD as it will improve the performance considerable as the game gets unpacked as you progress in the game. So running the game first time may be a bit stuttering.

Running Bard’s Tale 4
The last thing is the command to start Bard’s Tale 4;

gamemoderun steam STEAM_RUNTIME=1 steam://rungameid/1091980

Enjoy!!! :slight_smile:

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I’m not an avid gamer (Wesnoth and GZDoom are good enough for me) :upside_down_face: but it looks like if you drop the reference to Bard’s tale you’ve got an excellent article for optimizing most new games and lots of :heart:

I would then also add a section to set swappiness to 10 and add a verification section to check whether the correct GPU is being used.

:innocent:

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Thanks for the feedback. When I get some more time I’ll expand the guide :slight_smile:

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The default of swapiness is 60. Wouldn’t it be better to lower the number to force the system to use the RAM instead of swap? By setting it up to 80 you force more into the swap area.

On my machine I have 32 GB RAM and would like to use them instead off swap. So lowering the number gets more into the RAM which s faster.

A

vm.swappiness=20
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

could perhaps do the trick to speed things up.

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Guide updated.

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I’m an idiot and you’re right! editing that!