Hi there, I’ve been troubleshooting this all day and my googling keeps yielding search results that appear barely tangentially related so I’m hopeful someone here can help me figure out something new to try.
I’m running Bazzite on my desktop with an RTX 4090, 64 GB of DDR4, and multiple SSDs. Bazzite+Proton have been having no trouble running most of the games I’ve been playing lately (namely Helldivers 2 and Borderlands 3), but last night I booted into my tiny Windows 11 partition on a separate small SSD and after I booted back into Bazzite, all games I’ve launched since then have been stuttering and lagging visibly like you wouldn’t believe.
What I did not do: update my system or change any configuration.
What I have tried:
- Fiddling with graphics settings of the games that I’ve been playing, and when that yielded no clear results I installed Left 4 Dead 2. Notably, L4D2 has a native Linux version and does not run on Proton. Also, this game is 15 years old and runs on PCs that don’t have dedicated GPUs. L4D2 is stuttering and lagging just like the other games I’ve tried.
- Noting that the GPU usage didn’t seem to be an issue, I opened my resources monitor on my second screen. I could easily tell that in the moments of the worst performance stuttering in any game, there was a significant corresponding drop in GPU usage and a notable spike in reads done on the drive where the game was installed
- Seeing as how Steam likes to do shader pre-loading, I thought there could be an issue with the shaders that were cached or something so I tried disabling and re-enabling the shader pre-caching to force all the shaders to re-load. This yielded no positive results
- Realizing I’ve had issues with my drives failing before, I moved where the games were installed to try each of my SSDs. This made no noticable difference in performance.
- Rebooting. Yes, I have tried turning it off and back on again. I even tried switching off the PSU and unplugging it just to see if it needed a full discharge or something.
Things to note about my computer:
- For whatever reason, recently Bazzite decided it no longer was allowed to automount any of my drives. Whenever the system boots up, all of the non-primary drives/partitions are un-mounted and I need to mount them.
- I cannot mount my drives from Gnome Disks. The utility, without fail, tells me: “Error mounting filesystem; Error mountiing system-managed device <devicedirectory> … Can’t lookup blockdev.” I can only mount my drives from the command line using “sudo mount <dir> <dev> “ and that works fine for whatever reason. Is this relevant? Idk, I’m still very much a Linux novice.
- As I’m typing this right now, it definitely appears like my screen is stuttering as it does while I’m playing a game, so I just switched to Steam since I know that the newer library display uses a good amount of GPU power just to display the fancy game cards. Scrolling up and down really fast shows me that the screen is indeed stuttering just here on the desktop.
I’d appreciate any suggestion at all here. Any thing I could possibly try. I have no idea what changed when I rebooted my system that hasn’t changed before and I’m kind of losing my mind about this.
Many thanks for the time you spent even just reading this.
