Fedora 42 stuttering, short freezes in several native games

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1

Hello !

I’m running Fedora 42 KDE with an RX 9070 XT.
I’m experiencing severe stuttering (small freezes) on multiple native Linux games.

Not all native games are affected however:

  • Flatpak games are not affected
  • Godot 4.2.1 is not affected

Also, the Windows versions of NotBlood and ECWolf didn’t exhibit stuttering when run via Proton.

I’m running Kernel 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64 with Mesa 25.0.4-2.fc42

Here are some affected games.
(Sorry about the video quality on some of these)

Dhewm3

Slipstream

ECWolf

NotBlood

Has anyone faced the same issue ?

Thanks in advance.

2

Slipstream looks like a 50Hz game run on 60Hz Monitor. I only know this from various emulators especially System designed for PAL.

But i have no clue for the Pauses. i would Try changing the Monitor frequency, if possible.

3

Hi, thank you for your feedback !

I don’t know why the Slipstream video looks like this through Google Drive, on my PC the framerate is smooth and consistent. The tiny stutter is likely due to Google Drive’s rendering of the video. The pauses however do occur on my machine.

Changing the refresh rate unfortunately didn’t solve the pauses…
I tried 60hz, 120hz and 165hz, pauses still occur on Slipstream with all of these refresh rates.
I also tried putting the PC to sleep then waking it up, as well as connecting a graphics tablet, the pauses keep happening regardless.

4

I found a workaround.

When I add the game in Steam as a “non-steam game”, and run it with the Steam Linux Runtime (I used v3 “Sniper”), the pauses don’t occur.

Running the game through Heroic Games Launcher also works, for some reason (maybe since I’m using Heroic’s Flatpak build, the game isn’t using the system libraries ?)

I’m guessing the problem might be caused by some of the system’s libraries but I can’t say for sure.