Sysadmin Central

The old adage “How do you know somebody is a Linux user? Because they’ll tell you” is about to hold up true.

This is a bit of an odd one for this blog as I tend to limit it to more business-related topics, but I found a lack of proper guides on how to do this and I like to game in my spare time, which on Linux can be a bit more of an involved process.

I’ll cover playing Windows games on Linux in a future article, but I wanted to specifically cover how to limit any games FPS to a defined value. Which I’ve found to be very helpful recently where I wanted to run a game in windowed mode (It’s odd but playing the latest Lego Star Wars stutters horribly unless it’s in windowed mode) but found it was running at several hundred frames per second unnecessarily.

The Solution

The solution in this case is a brilliant project called libstrangle, which is a Gitlab project by Björn Spindel which can be found here – https://gitlab.com/torkel104/libstrangle.

This project allows us to specify a maximum FPS value, and we can use it as a Steam launch option to consistently limit FPS.

Setup Instructions

Open a terminal then run the command below.

sudo apt-get install git, libc6-dev-i386, gcc-multilib, ia32-libs, mesa-com

This installs git which will allow us to download the project files and all of the dependencies listed in the project.

Now run the commands below in order, which will navigate to your own Downloads folders, download the project to that location and then navigate into the projects folder.

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://gitlab.com/torkel104/libstrangle.git
cd libstrangle

Now that we’re in the project folder, we can build the project, which is as simple as running the command below –

make

Now that the project is built, let’s install it –

sudo make install

It may now take a few minutes, but libstrangle will install.

You can verify when it’s installed by running the command below, which should output how to use the commandline to do various things with it. This took a minute or so after the program installed to work correctly for me –

strangle --help

Using in Steam

So we’ve now got the ability to limit the FPS of any program, the next step is to add it to the Launch Options in Steam. I’ll be limiting a game to 60fps.

1. Open Steam.
2. Locate the game you want to FPS limit in the library list.
3. Right-click the title in the list then select Properties.
4. Scroll down to ‘LAUNCH OPTIONS’ in the General tab.
5. Enter the following text exactly as shown –

strangle 60 %command%

Now simply press play and the game should now be limited to 60 fps. If you want to run at a different fps then simply replace 60 with the required value.