Extremely low performance on Fedora compared to Windows

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Hi Everyone,

After several problems with windows, a friend decided to install fedora 37 on his pc and give it a chance, I’ve been using fedora for two years and have given him a hand but the disparity in performance has left me confused.

The configuration on which we installed it is as follows:

Ryzen 7 1700(not X)

8Gb ram 2133Mhz

Gigabyte GTX 1060 3G in first slot PCIe 3 x16

SSD 250Gb sata root partition

HDD 500Gb sata 5200RPM not mounted after installation

After completing the installation we performed all the updates and after the restart we installed the nvidia proprietary drivers, installed steam from rpm and added the NTFS formatted HDD to fstab (I know they don’t perform well but we were curious to try).

The tested game is Subnautica which received the steamdeck update and verified status on the day of installation, so it is in perfect condition to be used as a benchmark.

The difference in performance is abysmal and in addition we have also noticed several behaviors that do not occur on my installation. First this is the difference in frame + steamdeck as a comparison using proton-experimental:

Windows all max setting 1080p: 60-70 Fps installed on the slow HDD

Fedora all max setting 1080p: 12-29 Fps with frequent dip to 1-2 Fps installed on the slow HDD

Steamdeck all max settings 800p: 30-40Fps installed in the SD card

Also while playing, the discord audio became robotic and unintelligible, this doesn’t happen on my install or on my steamdeck.

These initial tests were done on the HDD so we assumed it was the NTFS that was causing problems, we then completely uninstalled Subnautica and reinstalled the same on the SSD in the /home partition, to our surprise the results were identical.

We then installed the Feral Gamemode and tried starting the game with “gamemoderun %command%” and this time the performance was WORSE with maxes of 20-22 FPS

Additional tests we ran were, making sure the nouveau drivers were blacklisted and nvidia was properly enabled in grub, switching Wayland to X11 and uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia drivers. All with no changes.

By now my friend has had to go back to Windows because he is participating in a drawing contest and we didn’t have time to search a fix, but later if possible he would like to give it another chance and this time I would like to be ready.

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You said the nvidia drivers were installed, but did not note how that was tested.
dnf list installed '*nvidia*' and lsmod | grep nvidia are good info to use.
It also would be good to know the source of the installed nvidia drivers. rpmfusion? or some other source.

Also, did you install the cuda drivers for the nvidia card? If you used the rpmfusion repo then dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda would install that for you.

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I am not much of a hardware man, so take this just a direction where you might look, but I am not sure if this is your case as I do not know which hardware is which and what its specs are.

Sometimes there are dual cards that switch between performace modes. On Windows, this comes automatically when correct drivers are installed, but in Linux it needs some more tweaking. It is possible that you are running in the low performance mode of such a card.

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Sorry, I forgot to specify how I did it. I used the “Software” application to install them, the repo is rpmfusion-nonfree.

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I also thought the same thing, but checking with NVtop I can see the video card go up to 100% usage, same thing I can see the processor scale correctly with htop

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Of course, because the dual card are basically two cards in one piece of hardware. One is simple with limited resources and the other is a fancy quick powerful beast. No wonder, the simple one could be using the 100% usage without giving you what you need.

According to this, the card should work under Fedora => Nvidia GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB]

Maybe @kparal would know?

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Sorry, maybe we’re getting confused. I agree with what you say in the case of dual cards, like on a laptop where you have one card integrated in the processor and one dedicated, but in this case the processor doesn’t have an integrated card so the 1060 is the only card in the system. For the link you sent, I agree that in theory it should work fine since mine is from the same series and runs smoothly with the same drivers.

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I suggest testing a different game, to rule out any game-specific (or game+hardware-specific) bugs.

Based on ProtonDB reports, Subnautica might have rare performance issues affecting a small number of users.

A 1060 user mentions having to use fullscreen, although their launch options seem to be wrong/incomplete. You could try either:

-window-mode exclusive

or

gamemoderun %command% -window-mode exclusive

as the game launch options in Steam (source).

gamemode causing worse performance is also very strange. Maybe something about the CPU is detected wrongly? htop can show CPU usage/freq per core; any noticeable difference with/without gamemode?

For GPU, I’m not familiar with NVtop, but you can run nvidia-smi dmon in a terminal to monitor in real time. nvidia-smi is in the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda RPMFusion package.

mangodhud can do all the above in an overlay which may be easier for testing.

My hardware is in a similar class (i5-8400, 8Gb RAM, GTX 1050 Ti 4Gb) and I’ve generally had no issues with even more demanding games on Fedora.

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Maybe this comment is not wished here, but this setup seems like a typical Nobara case for me? Only reason I dont use it (apart from weird preinstalled software) is that is has no OSTree version. If you use the regular Version anyways, why not use the many many steps the Nobara Devs did to make everything work?

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sorry, i’m not familiar with what a nubara case is, could you elaborate more? i tried to search online but i found nothing

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Jnstall Nobara Linux. There are different types of Distributions, regular ones install apps to the system, require lots of sudo and are prone to bugs because users change stuff. But there are system mods that require that.

Immutable Distros are way more stable, as the system always stays the same more or less. They will work the same after years of usage, you can reset them if you want, without losing any user files. So do backups, but you dont really need them.

These Distros require flatpaks (maybe snaps?), appimages, direct executeables or Containers like Distrobox or Toolbox.

But you want to use regular fedora, and Nobara is also regular. Its a patched version of fedora with lots of great changes. Try it out

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They mean Nobara, a “gaming distro” based on Fedora.

@boredsquirrel I don’t think it’s helpful to suggest switching distros for a relatively narrow problem. What happens if there’s the same problem (or different problem) on the other distro? Switch again? You’ll run out of OSes before you run out of problems.

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In that sense most Distros make no sense, and I agree. But Nubara does a lot of fixes and I wouldnt be surprised if it gave a way better experience out of the box.

Later you can focus on what fixes made the difference and just apply the configs to main Fedora.

There are lots of changes I wouldnt want to do manually

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I think what is being suggested is that Nobara is a specialized distro based on Fedora that has explicitly been tweaked for gaming. Most of the distro is the base Fedora, but with a lot of tweaks in graphics and otherwise to support gaming. They seem to keep it current with the base fedora version.

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Ok now it’s clear to me what Nobara is, but I would like to avoid putting him in a different system than mine. We are a plane flight away and if he has problems I can’t go in person to help him, so it is preferable that he has the same system as me so if he has a problem I can try to replicate it on my pc.

I also apologize for not giving the requested command output quickly, but at least for another couple of days it will have to stay on windows before trying again.

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In that case, if you want the same systems and are open to trying something new you might just try an install of Nobara for yourself to see the differences and similarities. Most of the system seems a vanilla fedora system.

You then would be able to tell the differences and similarities for remote assistance.

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@alessap did you try a different proton version. Experimental can sometimes be the worst option, i.e. latest stable I think Proton 7 ?

Another item jumping out at me is the 8GB of RAM is that a single stick?

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I will probably try it in the future, for now I need to have a stable and “vanilla” system because I also have a second work account on the same pc and it’s difficult for me to reconfigure everything before needing it again

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We did most of the tests on the Experimental because with 7.0 we didn’t notice any differences compared to the Experimental.

The 8Gb are 2 sticks of 4Gb, the motherboard is an ITX with only 2 ram slots which are therefore fully populated.

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