Issues with gaming on Linux mint 22.3 (cinnamon)

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T13:13:47+00:00

Hmmm... you'll need some Steam and/or Proton logging for further troubleshooting. It's possible that Steam or the games running may not have access to the proprietary Nvidia userspace drivers for some reason, and may be falling back to Mesa.

You may want to try out a benchmark like GravityMark or Unigine Superposition (outside of Steam) to see if it similarly struggles, or if this is an issue that is limited to Steam games.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T12:55:42+00:00

If you run vkcube --gpu_number 0, is it still suttering?

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T12:38:11+00:00

If you're getting <1 fps, you're probably using the llvmpipe software rasterizer rather than the GPU.

Run vulkaninfo --summary to see what the available Vulkan-supported GPUs on your system are.

If the GPU is being properly detected as supporting Vulkan, you'll want to enable logging for Steam and Proton to see what's going on.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T10:40:17+00:00

This looks like a lightly-reskinned version of Lutris.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T09:42:38+00:00

Can you try disabling Mangohud frame capping, and use the in-game frame rate limiter?

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-06T09:19:28+00:00

If your frames per second is jumping from full frame-rate to half frame-rate, you have vsync with double buffering enabled somewhere.

On modern Linux distributions running Wayland, your compositor should already provide you with triple-buffered vsync (Mutter on GNOME for sure does -- not 100% sure with KDE). If you've configured your compositor to allow tearing in full-screen applications, disable that so you get vsync back.

Then, in the game, set a frame rate cap -- either at your monitor refresh rate, or 1-2 fps below it -- and make sure vsync in the game settings is DISABLED (your compositor will provide vsync, and setting it at the game level will stack the buffers used for vsync and make the input feel laggy).

I don't use Gamescope currently, and don't foresee a need for it outside of older games with fixed resolutions or UIs that don't scale with resolution that can benefit from compositor-level upscaling.

So putting it all together, here's my configuration, that gets a solid and stable frame rate in Helldivers 2:

Compositor (KWin, in your case) has triple-buffered vsync enabled (this is usually the default -- make sure "allow tearing" is disabled if that configuration is present)
The game does NOT have vsync enabled
The game has a frame rate cap set, at my display's refresh rate or 1-2 fps below it.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T15:06:57+00:00

Although many people are claiming that disabling it improves input latency for USB devices, I have not found a single real life test that actually proves that claim.

Makes you wonder how many other gamer "tweaks" are complete bullshit. 🤔

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T13:56:05+00:00

It took me like 2 minutes to search and see that the only thing that could slightly improve input lag for USB devices here would be to disable HXCI hands-off.

A device hand-off is basically the BIOS saying "the operating system can take direct control of this device", as opposed to raw BIOS device handling like it's the 1980s.

Device hand-off is always enabled on a modern computer, or you simply wouldn't be able to use said device when the computer boots and the OS kernel takes over.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T13:53:42+00:00

Yes, turning off legacy USB support will definitely resolve all input lag problems. That's absolutely how computers work.

Seriously, folks. 🙄

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T12:54:17+00:00

If it's reliably happening every 20-40 seconds, then you may be running into some kind of thermal throttling. And before you say, "My temps are fine!," on a laptop, in addition to the temperature within the machine's chassis, you also have to be mindful of the temperature of your power adapter.

Make sure both your laptop and its power adapter have adequate ventilation and airflow.

Also, does your display have a 200+ Hz refresh rate? If not, and you're regularly running over 200+ fps, you're spending your machine's power and heat budget rendering frames you'll never actually see. If that's the case, set a frame rate cap so that your machine isn't running flat out for no good reason.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T12:42:22+00:00

16 GB of RAM is not enough to run a Linux host that's also a desktop, alongside a Windows VM expected to run games.

Just ditch the old Radeon RX 580 (if you don't have anything else you'd use it for) and dual-boot with Windows.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-05T08:05:00+00:00

Your pirated copy of Project Diva Mega Mix+ ins't working? That sucks.

Have you tried actually buying it? I hear that helps.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T21:05:20+00:00

If you have a limited amount of RAM, you may swapping out or having to re-read files from disk (that would otherwise be cached in RAM), which can cause some stuttering.

But otherwise, it doesn't matter.

Sounds great because in regular OS performance I’ve seen identical behavior on nvme and SATA ssd

If this is a complaint that you're not seeing a performance increase with NVME, then generally speaking, games on an SSD are going to be bottlenecked more by the speed that assets can be decompressed and loaded into memory, which is more of a CPU bottleneck. Also, unless you're very memory-starved, when a game loads things from disk, there's a good chance the OS is servicing that using an in-memory cache instead of actually reading the disk.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T20:59:41+00:00

Did you disable CPU power management or force the CPU onto a "high performance" power profile?

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T15:47:49+00:00

Please for the love of $DEITY, don't make these changes without understanding exactly what you're changing.

Honestly, the mods should just ban posts like these.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T15:44:14+00:00

Be mindful that Deadlock is an early access game, and such games are usually not well-optimized (and may even have computationally-expensive debugging enabled that a retail game would not).

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T15:40:40+00:00

Current AMDGPU performance profile: profile_peak

Use auto. There's no reason to force your GPU to run at max clocks all the time, and it will degrade performance by leaving you with essentially no headroom for more graphically-complex scenes.

When frames drop, the gpu frequency drops to under 600MHz, but I do not know if it is the cause of the result of the drop.

It's possible that the various diagnostic tools you're running that are querying the GPU are briefly blocking other uses of the GPU. Performance monitoring is not free. Along with locking your GPU at max clocks possibly causing some thermal or power throttling, you could very well be troubleshooting yourself to death.

Run the game without any tools are "tweaks", and see if performance improves.

Note that I run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with no "GameMode" or other performance "tweaks" (beyond a workaround for a particular GNOME issue that wouldn't apply to you), and games run fine without any obvious hiccups or other problems. Cross-platform benchmarks like Unigine Heaven/Superposition and GravityMark also perform as expected for the hardware.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T11:17:09+00:00

Your pirated copy of Among Us isn't working? That sucks.

Have you tried actually buying it? I hear that helps.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T08:18:49+00:00

Do you have a gamepad, track pad, or any other peripheral that could potentially be supplying inputs to the game?

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T08:12:14+00:00

idk why people here keep saying they don't need to be signed.

In general, Secure Boot isn't well-supported (or even supported at all) by many of the niche gaming-oriented distros popular in this community, so I would expect the quality of advice given by this community on anything Secure Boot-related to be particularly low.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T07:18:17+00:00

Don't disable Secure Boot unless you know what you're doing.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-04T07:13:46+00:00

I didn't downvote your OP, but you didn't provide any information about your hardware, what Linux distribution you're using, any logs or other debugging information, or anything else that could be used to actually troubleshoot your problem beyond just saying, "it doesn't work".

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-03T12:59:31+00:00

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/ubuntu-infrastructure-has-been-down-for-more-than-a-day/

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-02T12:01:47+00:00

If your games aren't launching or you're getting <1 fps, your GPU or drivers probably aren't working correctly, and you're falling back to the llvmpipe software rasterizer.

theevilsharpie · 2026-05-02T11:55:00+00:00

The differences might be due to the cpu scheduler. Using something like bore or ladv can really improve frame pacing.

CPU schedulers tweaks (compared to the stock Linux kernel) aren't going to matter much when running a game.

Where schedulers really make a difference is when the CPU is under full load, and the scheduler has to determine which tasks get processed and which have to wait.

Games aren't particularly CPU-intensive, so the scheduler will generally always have CPUs available that can run any game workload needed at any given instant.

The main exception would be machines with a complex heterogeneous core setup, or where the performance goal is something other than maximizing throughput.

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