Some games have their FPS capped to a certain value, usually 60, due to technical limitations in the physics engine. Running these games with a screen that outputs more than 60 Hz can be an awful experience, where those 60 FPS can feel like 40 or even 30 due to them being lower than your native refresh rate. This script aims to automate the process of changing it to smoothen the overall gaming experience.

Elden Ring's DLC Shadow of the Erdtree launched very recently and it's been a while since I last played ER. After booting it and solving the DLC problem in the most Linux way (creating an empty file inside ER's directory), the game felt very sluggish and definitely not smooth. That's when I remembered almost all FromSoft games are FPS locked due to their engine's physics, and I'm playing on a 75 Hz monitor. Tried setting up some launch options for the game to execute xrandr and change the monitor's refresh rate at launch and exit, but for some reason it wouldn't start. So, since I'm in summer break from university, I decided to build something of my own.

For this tool to work, you will need to have xrandr (for X11 sessions) and the command-line tool jq, which is the JSON parser used by the script.

For Wayland sessions, see Wayland support

So far, this piece of software has been tested only in my machine running Arch Linux 6.9.7.

This repository contains two main scripts: rrw.sh and rrw-jsongen.sh.

• rrw.sh is the tool itself.
• rrw-jsongen.sh is the JSON generator utility for RRW that it will parse to extract process names and, in the future, custom refresh rates for each title, with the default being 60.

To download this tool, simply clone this repository in your directory of choice with your terminal via:

git clone https://github.com/AmeeQAQ/RRW.git

Once cloned, cd into said directory and execute the script called install.sh:

bash install.sh

This script will check first the necessary dependencies for RRW to work. After that, if everything went well, you'll be prompted to introduce your password in order to actually install RRW. By default, it copies rrw.sh and rrw-jsongen.sh into /usr/local/bin/. You can modify this location if needed (for example ~/bin/), but I recommend that one because it's the standard for custom scripts and executables. Besides that, it also creates a new folder in ~/.config/ called rrw, where config files such as games.json and rrw.conf will be stored.

• games.json is the JSON file generated by rrw-jsongen. After installation, you will be asked to run this utility and add all the games you need to keep track of.
• rrw.conf contains necessary information about your system. It is VERY important to modify this file and write the values you need for your own personal case. In particular, you need to know which one is your main display (or the one you use for games), resolution and the refresh rate you usually use it with. Those parameters go into the three variables stored in this config file. If you skip this step, the script won't work. All of this info is easily accessible using xrandr.

Once the installation is done, you'll need to run rrw-jsongen, where you'll need to pass the process' names of the games you want to keep track of as parameters of this command. An example of usage would be this one:

rrw-jsongen eldenring DarkSoulsRemastered

That example would output the following JSON:

{"games":[{"name":"eldenring"},{"name":"DarkSoulsRemastered"}]}

Once this is done, you can run RRW by simply typing rrw:

rrw

Depending on the desktop enviroment you are using, the wayland compositor might be one or the other. While in X11 xrandr works for any DE, in Wayland this is different, and every DE or WM has its own compositor or uses wlroots. I expect wlroots to be the most used library, which allows for wlr-randr to be the main dependency/tool for most environments, while having the possibility of accomodating the script for other specific tools provided by the DEs, like kscreen-doctor, or community-driven ones like gnome-randr-rust.

Nevertheless, as more DEs start adopting Wayland as their main display server, or offer some solid support for it, I'll be filling up this list with the added dependencies for Wayland sessions:

• KDE: kscreen-doctor
• Gnome: gnome-randr-rust
• wlroots compositors (Hyprland, sway,...): wlr-randr

This package is functional but still early in development. Thus, compatibility errors and unexpected bugs may come up the more the package is used. For now, some of its limitations are:

• No Wayland support (script uses xrandr for screen mngmnt). See Wayland support
• Refresh rate only gets lowered to 60. Most monitors can't go lower than 60 Hz, and if they can, it probably doesn't matter for games that are locked at 30 FPS, which would be the other use case for this script.
• Untested with multiple displays.

All of them will, hopefully, be addressed in the near future.

Some planned upgrades are:

• Offline game database to map game name to process name (would be used by rrw-jsongen.sh).
• Auto-fetch default primary display settings and session info.
• Generation of logs.
• Packaging/Deploying to community repos for an easier installation (like the AUR).