penguin-burner 0.5.2

NVIDIA GPU tuning tool for Linux: automatic and adaptive undervolting, an in-game monitoring overlay with PC latency and pre-frame-generation FPS, plus MSI Afterburner imports and LACT exports

NVIDIA GPU Auto Tuning Linux Tool

PenguinBurner tunes your NVIDIA GPU on Linux, starting with automatic and adaptive undervolting, plus an optional in-game monitoring overlay with a PC latency meter and pre-frame-generation FPS that updates live.

You get quieter fans, lower temperatures, and lower power draw, with no manual trial and error. It tests your card under real load, finds a stable efficient setting, and can switch settings automatically as your frame rate changes.

Works on the NVIDIA proprietary driver with RTX 50 (Blackwell), RTX 40 (Ada), and RTX 30 (Ampere) cards. A recent driver is recommended.

The goal is an all-in-one package for NVIDIA on Linux that is easy to install and use, closing the feature gap with the Windows tools Linux users miss: the NVIDIA App, NVUV, and MSI Afterburner.

Install

python -m pip install --user --upgrade penguin-burner

Also packaged for Fedora (COPR), Arch / CachyOS (AUR), and Ubuntu (PPA) — commands in the Install guide.

Run the GUI with penguin-burner (or pburn). Install the NVIDIA driver and CUDA first.

Quick start

1. Install (above) with the NVIDIA driver and CUDA already set up.
2. Launch PenguinBurner (penguin-burner).
3. Click Setup Auto Undervolt, choose a performance bias, and let the scan find and verify a stable curve.
4. On the Profiles tab, select the result and click Apply Selected. Toggle Silent fan curve for the quiet fan profile.
5. Enable Persist on Startup to apply it at boot, or Apply Adaptive to switch tiers as your frame rate changes.

Automatic Tuning

Tests your card under real load and finds the most efficient stable undervolt curve for you. The sweep runs PenguinBurner's managed headless Q2RTX benchmark plus a CUDA compute test, with stability and performance checks built in. If a scan crashes mid-probe, the next run records that voltage/clock band as unsafe and can resume from saved candidates for the same tier.

Pick a bias (Efficiency, Balanced, or Performance) and it finds the matching sweet spot, then verifies it before saving.

Read the guide

Adaptive Undervolting

Tag your saved profiles as Efficiency, Balanced, or Performance, and PenguinBurner switches between them while you play: efficient and silent when you have headroom, more clock when frames start to drop.

Read the guide

PenguinBurner vs LACT (NVIDIA)

LACT is the broader, more established Linux GPU app, and it landed a working Nvidia VF curve setter before we did. It supports more brands and has deeper monitoring than we do. PenguinBurner is narrower on purpose: automatic undervolting, an in-game overlay, and adaptive switching. NVIDIA-only comparison, to the best of our knowledge:

Capability (NVIDIA)	PenguinBurner	LACT
Automatic undervolt search (stability + perf verified)	✅ Q2RTX + CUDA sweep	❌ manual only
Adaptive undervolt (switches tiers by frame rate)	✅	❌
In-game performance overlay	✅	❌
PC latency meter	✅	❌
Pre-frame-generation FPS counter (base vs FG FPS)	✅	❌
Manual V/F curve editor	✅	✅
Fan curve control	✅ auto silent curve + editor	✅ custom curves
Power limit	🚧 planned	✅
Steam library import	🚧 planned	❌
Per-game tuning profiles	🚧 planned	❌
Runtime profile switching	✅ by present-frame FPS pacing	✅ by running process / gamemode
MSI Afterburner import	✅	❌
Historical telemetry charts	🚧 planned (live overlay today)	✅ charts + CSV export
Detailed GPU info (VBIOS / VRAM / Vulkan / throttling)	❌ tuning-focused	✅
Other GPU brands (AMD / Intel)	❌ NVIDIA-native, for now	✅ AMD · Intel · NVIDIA
systemd daemon · CLI / headless	✅ · ✅	✅ · ✅

✅ available · ❌ not available · 🚧 planned/in progress

LACT monitors inside its own window (charts and CSV) and has no in-game overlay; on Linux that is usually a separate tool like MangoHud. PenguinBurner's overlay is built in.

The two interoperate via LACT export, so you can tune with PenguinBurner and run the resulting curve under LACT if you prefer.

Roadmap (planned, not yet shipped)

• Power limit control — set the GPU board power cap.
• Historical data plotting — power, clocks, and FPS over time.
• Steam library discovery — find installed games automatically.
• Per-game tuning — save and auto-apply a profile per game.

Performance Overlay

A lightweight live on-screen readout over your game. It can visualize PC latency and pre-frame-generation FPS — things most Linux overlays can't — alongside frame-gen FPS, clocks, voltage, power, temperatures, and the active tier.

Launch it with the game via PENGUIN_BURNER %command%, then toggle the fields you want. Any tuning change you make is reflected live in the overlay while you play, so you see the effect of an undervolt, clock, or fan change in real time without leaving the game.

If you want the detailed numbers behind that LAT figure, start the daemon with PENGUIN_BURNER_DUMP_LATENCY_DATA=1 in its environment. It dumps the full per-frame latency breakdown — present mode, queue depth, Reflex sleep-mode/boost, and the display/scanout split — to the daemon log, which you can capture to a file by also passing --debug-log.

Read the guide

More features

• Profile management — apply, verify, tier, export, and clean up saved curves.
• Curve editors — Afterburner-style manual V/F and fan curve editors with full keyboard control.
• Silent fan curve — auto-generated quiet fan curve once the undervolt brings temperatures down.

MSI Afterburner Import

Bring your Windows MSI Afterburner profile over and import its V/F curve.

Point PenguinBurner at the real MSI Afterburner directory (no Afterburner binaries or profiles are bundled in this repo). Default Windows path:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI Afterburner

LACT Export

Export any saved V/F (and optionally fan) curve as a complete Nvidia LACT config from the Profiles view. See the Auto-UV guide for the workflow.

Run At Your Own Risk

Auto-UV makes real hardware changes — enabling persistence mode, setting board power limits, writing core/memory V/F offsets, and taking over fan control.

The Balanced and Efficiency Auto-UV profiles are ultra-defensive. Balanced at most retains the card's stock clock, probing gently for lower voltage. Efficiency just follows the stock curve on the first pass — lowering power consumption by reducing clock — then undervolts only very slightly.

Performance undervolt mode is the one that pushes past stock. On my RTX 5080, during the OC phase I sometimes get a "Vulkan device lost", which PenguinBurner catches and then reverts the problematic voltage/frequency point. Worst case is a hard system freeze and reboot — after which the blacklisted V/F point is persisted to the UV history file in your home directory, so it is not retried.

You can also define, in the Performance UV dialog, exactly which voltage/frequency point the card is pushed to over stock limits. The default is the suggested point for 30/40/50-tier GPUs, based on experiments with this and similar tools on Windows. Performance is optional anyway — OC is not mandatory.

Acknowledgements

PenguinBurner was built through agentic AI development, guided by human ideas and direction. The implementation, research, and reverse engineering were driven primarily by GPT 5.5 (OpenAI) and Claude Opus (Anthropic), with brief use of Fable (Anthropic).

• NVIDIA — for the graphics technology that, unfortunately, lacks some features and polish on Linux.
• Qt Project — for the excellent Qt6 UI.

Special thanks to the LACT project and Ilya Zlobintsev for pushing Linux NVIDIA tuning forward — in particular LACT #957 (Nvidia VF curve editor), merged April 18, 2026.

Support

• Sponsor the project
• Report a bug

CLI Documentation

The CLI-focused README is archived in readme-cli.md.

Start clean

Reset PenguinBurner user state for a fresh run:

rm -rf ~/.config/PenguinBurner ~/.local/share/PenguinBurner ~/.cache/PenguinBurner

Installing from a local checkout? See the Install guide.