Certain Steam games having low FPS on Fedora 44

Ask Fedora
1

After updating to Fedora 44, specific steam games are running at as low as 1/10th the FPS they were prior to the update:

REPO: No Change
Blue Prince: No Change
TF2: No Change
Cultic: 6 FPS, was 60FPS
Guilty Gear Strive: 20 FPS, was 60FPS
Minecraft (non-steam): No Change

I’ve already run into some issues getting my GTX 1060 3gb mini working on the most recent update, so I think this is a graphics driver issue and not a Steam issue. Has anyone had similar issues or have any idea what could be causing this?

I run all my Windows Steam games using Proton 10.0-4, some fail to launch on other versions.

2

With that GPU, you will need to switch to the 580 drivers if you haven’t already:

3

I already followed that guide to fix a different issue.

4

Can you confirm you have the nvidia drivers load please.
What does lsmod | grep nvidia show?

5

nvidia_drm 159744 101
nvidia_modeset 1937408 28 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm 4100096 0
nvidia 111661056 771 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_drm,nvidia_modeset
drm_ttm_helper 20480 2 nvidia_drm
video 81920 2 asus_wmi,nvidia_modeset

New symptom: I tried to play Turbo Overkill, it ran at 60fps but crashed within a minute of starting, I am now getting this error in system monitor:

image
image1920×350 37.4 KB

Yes, the first part of the error is illegible because it goes off screen. I was also getting this error when I first identified this issue, but it went away after setting my Backend Rendering to Automatic.

EDIT: New symptom. I set Backend Rendering to Automatic again, now steams games appear to not be using my graphics card when the run. All games are unplayable because my GPU utilization sits at 0% while my CPU utilization jumps to 100% every time I launch a game.

6

Start Steam from terminal. It’ll print all the logs in real time. May give you a hint as to why it crashed.
I suspect that you ran out of VRAM, as 3 GB is pretty rough for Linux these days, especially with NVIDIA.
Try monitoring the GPU memory usage while the game runs.

7

I don’t think VRAM is the issue considering my games were working fine before I updated to Fedora 44.
I’ve been monitoring the GPU and memory usage, it is currently locked at 0% for all games because Steam now refuses to use my graphics card.

Minecraft still runs fine though.

8

What was your VRAM use before the upgrade with the game that runs for a bit and then crashes? What is it after the upgrade? Without measuring, you can’t rule it out. E.g. maybe you were close to the limit before, and now it just so happens that you’re over the limit due to a small increase in usage.

Regardless, if you want to investigate this, you need to provide the Steam logs. It’ll show which GPUs it detects and any errors that could point to the real culprit.

9

Installed a new copy of Steam through rpmfusion instead of through flathub, now everything is running buttery smooth like it was before.

EDIT: Clarifying in case it is useful to someone else. If you installed steam through the Software app, check the drop down menu under the Open button. If the only option is Flathub, type “steam” into the command line and follow the prompts as they appear. Once that finishes installing, you will have two versions of Steam on your computer.
Open both versions of steam, and on each one click steam in the top left > settings > Storage. One of your versions of Steam should have all your games installed, the other should have none. On each one, click the “…” > Browse Folder. Now you have two folders open, copy all the files from the folder with everything to the folder thats mostly empty. This will migrate all your installations to the new version of Steam.
Then open software and uninstall the Flathub version of Steam.

10

Sorry, did not think to ask. It’s well know that the flathub steam has issues vs. rpmfusion steam version.

11

So I uninstalled the new drivers and re-installed the v580 drivers for the GTX 1070 TI and confirmed that I have the RPM version of Steam, but my game (Dead by Daylight) still performs terribly compared to Fedora 43. Do you have any other suggestions I can try out?

Before, I just launched the game without configuring any of the compatibility settings and it ran at 60 FPS the whole time while on high settings. After I upgraded to 44, it would barely hit 60 and would consistently dip down to 15 depending on the effects or how many models pop up on screen. I have tried to use the built in Proton settings as well as Proton GE 11 but the performance is the same. There were no update for the game within this period either, so I don’t think the game is causing the issues

12

Something to keep in mind in general is that with flatpaks you need the NVIDIA flatpak packages installed after you update the GPU driver. This is an extra step after you install the GPU driver and reboot. flatpak update takes care of that.

I suggest you start a new thread for your issue. (And attach the system specs and Steam logs.)