Ubuntu 24.04 Makes Tiny Tweak to Hugely Improve Gaming
Following a user suggestion Ubuntu developers have massively increased the distro’s virtual memory mapping limit.
This small change should have a big impact on gaming as titles previously reported to crash or exhibit performance issues on Ubuntu due to its vm_max_map_count value being too low will now work.
Games like Hogwarts Legacy, Payday 2, Counter-Strike 2, DayZ, and Star Citizen are among those likely to benefit from the value bump as Ubuntu gamers have complained that several of these refuse to start at all in current versions of Ubuntu owing to this issue.
Current versions of Ubuntu set the vm_max_map_count to 65530 which, for some games, is considered too low. So in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the value is raised to 1048576. This is the same value used by both Fedora and Pop!_OS.
GamingOnLinux:
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Ubuntu 24.04 increases vm.max_map_count for smoother Linux gaming
At last! Users from Ubuntu 24.04 onwards that's scheduled to release on April 25th should hopefully see a smoother Linux gaming experience.
There's been an issue for quite some time now in various Linux distributions where the value of vm.max_map_count is too low, which is by default set to 65530, and this causes a whole bunch of games to crash. Fedora changed this to a default of 1048576 back with Fedora Linux 39 and now it's the turn for Ubuntu to do the same.
On the bug report, it's been noted that a fix has been committed for Ubuntu 24.04 in the procps package that will now match the value that Fedora is using.