Glossary

CPU governor — Linux slows your CPU down when it thinks you're idle, to save power. During a game that causes stutter. Goblin Mode Pro locks it at performance while you play and restores it after.

EPP (Energy-Performance Preference) — a finer hint than the governor, on Intel P-state and AMD P-state. Set to performance alongside the governor.

renice — process priority. A lower "nice" number means the scheduler gives that process the CPU first.

RAPL / PL1 / PL2 — Intel's power-limit interface. PL1 is the sustained wattage, PL2 the short burst. Raising them lets the CPU hold its top speed longer if the cooling can keep up.

TDP — thermal design power; the wattage the chip is meant to run at. The AMD-laptop equivalent of RAPL, set via ryzenadj.

Screen tearing — normally the compositor adds a frame of delay for a clean picture. Allowing tearing removes that delay for lower input lag.

VRR / Adaptive Sync — the monitor matches the game's frame rate instead of a fixed one, removing a whole class of stutter. Needs a VRR-capable display.

Core pinning — restricting the game's threads to specific CPU cores: the fast cores of a hybrid CPU (Intel P-cores), or one CCD on a Ryzen (to avoid the cross-CCD latency penalty).

gamescope — a micro-compositor that gives a rock-solid frame cap, FSR/NIS upscaling and clean alt-tab.

Proton / DXVK / VKD3D — the translation layers that run Windows games on Linux. DXVK does Direct3D 9-11 → Vulkan; VKD3D-Proton does D3D12 → Vulkan.

1% low / 0.1% low FPS — the average of the slowest 1% (or 0.1%) of frames. A much better "is it smooth?" number than the average.

Curve Optimizer — AMD's per-core undervolt/frequency-curve tuning, applied via ryzenadj. Goblin Mode Pro only ever re-applies the offsets you already put in /etc/goblin-mode-pro/amd-undervolt.conf — it never picks values.

GSP firmware — NVIDIA's GPU System Processor, an offload microcontroller on the card itself that recent drivers use for parts of the kernel-mode work.

nvidia-drm.modeset — a boot-time kernel module parameter NVIDIA needs on for Wayland and explicit sync. There's no runtime toggle — changing it means writing a modprobe.d config and rebooting.