Arch Linux

scatherinch

Member

Registered: 2023-02-24

Posts: 160

[SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask for this, but I've been practically living on the Arch support community for a few weeks. Does anyone else have small (let's say 3-5 second) freezes during some games while playing games through steam's proton? The games I play run flawlessly save for these little 'spikes' that occur during gameplay. I was hoping someone might have some information?

Maybe there's some launch options in steam to get smash some of these kinks out but I'm not too familiar with them.

Anyways, this isn't anything new and it's been present over multiple installations, so it might just be that some games just don't work as expected in Linux. I am noobish, by the way.

Any advice?

Last edited by scatherinch (2023-11-07 11:43:23)

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 688

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

i dont use steam or play new games but i know protondb is a good source of info about how games run on proton and workarounds people use, look up the games you play and see what others have to say about them

scatherinch

Member

Registered: 2023-02-24

Posts: 160

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

Yeah, I know about protondb. I look at at it often, but I think the problem here is more generalized or in my config.  Either I didn't set my rig up correctly. The games I play are perfectly done, it's just this one problem where a random micro-stutter will occur. It's hard to debug, but I'd like to squash it.

EDIT: What I'm trying to ask for is if there's some sort of log file I could look for to find out more about what's going on in WINE.

Last edited by scatherinch (2023-09-04 17:03:34)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,179

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

That sounds like the fTPM stutters. Are you on an AMD CPU? make sure your system is up to date and on at least kernel 6.4.11+ as those will disable use of fTPM for randomness sourcing. Generally speaking some micro stutters are normal while shaders get compiled, but the stutters cause from that should lessen the more you play/if you have shader pre-compilation enabled in steam/with mesa 23.1.x on radv

scatherinch

Member

Registered: 2023-02-24

Posts: 160

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

@V1del

fTPM? Yea, I'm up to date. I did a pacman -Syu a few days ago. This stuttering problem has existed in previous installations of Arch as well.

Yes, I'm on an AMD CPU.

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Host: MS-7A40 2.0
Kernel: 6.4.12-zen1-1-zen
Uptime: 20 mins
Packages: 1231 (pacman), 7 (flatpak)
Shell: fish 3.6.1
Resolution: 1920x1080, 1920x1080
WM: awesome
Theme: Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: candy-icons [GTK2/3]
Terminal: alacritty
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (16) @ 3.900GHz
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 550 640SP / RX 560/560X
Memory: 8205MiB / 32041MiB

cloverskull

Member

Registered: 2018-09-30

Posts: 181

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

I can also vouch for shader pre-compilation and I recommend this for your problem

scatherinch

Member

Registered: 2023-02-24

Posts: 160

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

I do not have ftpm on. I did some research to learn what it is and checked it in the BIOS. The freezes I'm getting mainly last to about 2-3 seconds at random. The game I'm really worried about in this regard is FFXIV, which I'm using https://github.com/goatcorp/XIVLauncher.Core to launch it. (It even has an aur entry). So these happen at random and I'm not sure what to do about them. It uses an API to communicate with steam but I don't know of any way to cache these shaders.

Does this sound like cache building or could it be something?

6.5.5-zen1-1-zen (That should disable anything related to TPM?)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,179

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

If fTPM is disabled in the BIOS then this isn't the issue (... and it has been globally disabled for RNG in recent kernels so you're fine from that aspect as well)

Could be the cache building and a game as huge as FFXIV will definitely have a good bunch of them so this could be "normal". One thing you can try is enabling the GPL pipeline which is slated to be enabled by default in mesa 23.2 by exporting

RADV_PERFTEST=gpl

on starting the launcher. This also isn't the best GPU there is, are you sure you're not maxed on resources? Can you test the normal non-zen kernel? I could also see some (disk) scheduler differences giving you a potential hit, especially if this isn't with an nvme drive.

scatherinch

Member

Registered: 2023-02-24

Posts: 160

Re: [SOLVED] Proton: Random Freezes during Some Games

I've found out what the real culprit to this has been: My compositor.

If I kill picom before I go and do any sort of serious gaming that requires 3D elements, then my system doesn't stutter anymore. I did some more research into it the other day using this and I haven't stuttered since:

https://linux-gaming.kwindu.eu/index.ph … %20effects.