¶ Falcon
Falcon is a lightweight command-line utility designed to optimize game performance on Linux systems.
It works by managing CPU core affinity and system power profiles when launching applications.
¶ Features
- Automatically detects and assigns optimal CPU cores
- Manages power profiles for better performance
- Supports AMD CPU preferred core detection
- Configurable core selection strategies
- Custom core assignment options
¶ Usage
When used in steam game cmd line options:
falcon %command%
When used from the terminal:
falcon apptolaunch
If you have environment variables to set put them in front:
PROTON_LOG=1 falcon %command%
If you want to chainload other apps (e.g mangohud) they go after:
falcon mangohud %command%
If you want to use it in heroic launcher here is the setup:
¶ Configuration
The configuration file is stored at ~/.config/falcon/config.json
¶ Configuration options
{
"force_lscpu": false, // Force using lscpu instead of AMD detection
"thread_count": 16, // Number of threads to use
"override_thread_count": false, // Override automatic thread count detection
"enable_performance_mode": true, // Enable performance power profile
"disable_taskset": false, // Disable CPU core pinning
"custom_taskset": "", // Custom core list (e.g., "0,1,2,3")
"lscpu_core_strategy": "HighestFreq" // Core selection strategy: "HighestFreq" or "Sequential"
}
¶ Core Selection Strategies
HighestFreq: Selects cores with the highest frequency capability (default)
Sequential: Selects cores in sequential order
¶ AMD-Specific Features
On AMD systems, Falcon automatically detects what cores the system prefers, this could be ones with higher frequency or ones with extra cache.
For non-AMD systems or when force_lscpu is true, it falls back to lscpu for core frequency detection and uses that to rank the cores instead.
¶ Thread Count Defaults
When override_thread_count is false, Falcon uses these defaults for AMD CPUs:
- 32 thread CPU: 16 threads
- 24 thread CPU: 12 threads
- 16 thread CPU: 8 threads
- Other: Uses all available threads
For Intel CPUs if the CPU has P and E cores then Falcon will put the process on the P cores.
¶ Requirements
- A Linux system
- powerprofilesctl for power profile management
- taskset for CPU affinity management
¶ How It Works
- Loads configuration from ~/.config/falcon/config.json
- Detects available CPU cores and their frequencies/preference
- Selects optimal cores based on configuration
- Sets power profile to performance mode (if enabled)
- Launches the specified command with CPU affinity set to selected cores
¶ Source
Falcon is written in the Zig programming language and the source can be found on our git here.