Gamers can look forward to more epic top-tier titles working out-of-the-box in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which is due for release in late April.
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.
But many modern games require a much higher limit to deliver the best performance, and if the value is detected to be too low some titles won’t start at all.
Any game or software that makes heavy use of memory-mapped I/O (mmap) could benefit from this adjustment. You can read more about the virtual memory subsystem on kernel.org.
If you’re running Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds and can’t wait to test this change keep an eye out for an updated version of the procps package, which implements this much-welcome value bump.
This simple value change delivers a markedly better gaming experience on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with more Windows, Wine, and Proton/Steam games able to run out-of-the-box.