Games Stuttering On Linux

[VirtualDelinquent]

Greetings, I have been having a problem with my games stuttering and I haven't had much luck figuring it out on my own.

After about one hour of gameplay there will be severe stuttering, the FPS will drop from 30 to 10 back and forth very rapidly when moving the mouse. Keeping the mouse still and just using WASD to move doesn't affect the frames as much. Doesn't happen in Windows 11 with the same equipment, and it doesn't seem to happen while playing older titles like Fallout: New Vegas or MW2 Classic (2009). It's happening on more graphic intensive games such as Fallout 4 and Cyberpunk.

My system is a Lenovo Thinkstation P520 running Pop OS. Has an Xeon W-2135, two 16GB Samsung DDR4 modules, WD Black SN850X 2TB, 900W PSU, and the big Nvidia GTX 1070. Just updated to the latest BIOS from Lenovo, and updated the Nvidia drivers to the latest release that is available for Linux. Pop OS firmware is constantly updated, once a week I would say. I'm also using GEProton9-21, launching directly through Steam. It doesn't help if I use a different Proton version, games will still stutter.

The only problem I would immediately suspect is that my 1070 has two broken fans causing thermal throttling and limiting performance. One fan is missing in my attempt to clean it, the other does work if it's forced to spin. When I had two fans running the card stayed at a reasonable 70-72C and never throttled performance, but it still had stuttering around the usual time that it happens.


Let me know your thoughts, and thanks for your replies. I might delay on answering them, like Arch Dornan I work for a living, so most of my time is short but I will reply back when I can. 

[highduke]

Maybe related: 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope#Launching_gamescope_from_steam,_stuttering_after_~24_minutes

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/163

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/11446

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/3845

[VirtualDelinquent]

16 hours ago, highduke said:

Maybe related: 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope#Launching_gamescope_from_steam,_stuttering_after_~24_minutes

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/163

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/11446

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/3845

I tried the LD_PRELOAD and enabling/disabling Steam overlay suggestions in those articles there, no luck though. After about 55 minutes CyberPunk still stutters, I should probably test Fallout 4 but I think it would probably be the same result.

Someone also said in those articles that mangohud was causing an error. I have it disabled on Fallout 4 because the game will not launch when mangohud is active, and it will still stutter so I'm fairly certain it isn't that program.

This video from one of those articles is pretty accurate to what's going on, the experience is slightly different depending on which game I'm playing.