System stutters when starting the game

[smoky comet]

Good day,
I have Linux Mint 21.3 on the PC when I start playing in Steam or heroic. So from now on, when you play until the game is open, the PC stutters, does anyone know what could be the problem? As soon as the game is opened as a window, the jerking goes away.

my PC hardware is:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
Nvidia 4070ti
32GB Ram 6000mt/s
Gigabyte B650 Auros Elite AX
Nvidia driver 550.90.07
I hope this is enough information to help.

[stoic gate]

That's really strange

Have you tried other drivers though?

Try disabling V-Sync, and sometimes full screen mode is janky

[smoky comet]

My monitors can't do VSync and it's only when I press start game on Steam/Heroic. As long as the window is not open it jerks. Once the game is open it no longer jerks.

[stoic gate]

Well, the game is loading the assets/files, and then it might cause a stutter if the game is big enough

[smoky comet]

It only jerks between starting the game in Steam and opening the game window

[stoic gate]

What do you actually mean by jerking?

[stoic gate]

NVidia drivers are janky, so idk

[smoky comet]

when i open steam and press start, the pc stutters until the game window is open.

Sry I use a translator

[stoic gate]

Dont you think its because the game is loading the assets/files? if the game is big in file size, you can wait for pc stutters

Like you said, when the game opens, its just done

[smoky comet]

it only stutters extremely as long as no game window is open. This means that video playback or music also stutters. Mouse pointer stutters etc. When I have the system monitor open, the PC is at zero capacity all the time. I think even if the game is big this should not happen. Since I have pci gen4 M2 installed

[stoic gate]

@unique cosmos Our wizard can help you

As that seems a hardware related problem

[smoky comet]

I don't think my PC is defect 😮

[stoic gate]

It is not, and never will be

Linux is somewhat not ready for every hardware, as we are yet to see kernel 6.10 (or 7.0 if Linus Torvalds stop fucking with his keyboard)

[smoky comet]

I now have kernel 6.5

[stoic gate]

Did it fixed something?

Or was it the one before?

[smoky comet]

I have changed since the start. because the standard kernel didn't support my motherboard

[unique cosmos]

I will try.
The issue described sounds like the game being launched at too high process priority. Priority works differently on Linux than on Windows. It is called "niceness" here. The "nice" values should be assigned automatically in a sane fashion, and users should generally avoid fiddling with this. So I would first like to know if any fiddling with priorities was done here. If not, how did the nvidia 550 driver get on that system? Because I was not aware it is available in Driver Manager so far.

I looked it up, since last time I worked with this was ages ago. Niceness is actually the part of process priority that users are allowed to change. Pretty good explanation here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/656771/process-niceness-vs-priority
So what you can do is, increase niceness for things like audio playback and browsers, so they do not cut out. My suspicion is still that the nvidia driver is doing something fishy, again.

[smoky comet]

the driver was available in flatpak. thank you very much for the great explanation. I found out that it only happens with Windows games. Linux games only have it for a short time (0.1ms)

[unique cosmos]

I am fairly certain you cannot have flatpak drivers. So the issue here is that you did not use Driver Manager and mangled your installation with a foreign driver that does not fit the rest of the system. It may be that this is only really shows when running Proton and its Vulkan layer, but it is a general issue.

[smoky comet]

Yes, it was a system package, sorry. I have Linux Mint and just searched for the Nvidia driver 550 and installed it. I'm pretty new to Linux, sorry about that

[stoic gate]

It's fine, just do not commit the error, we have driver manager and things, and avoid installing drivers as a flatpak, but more using the additional drivers/driver manager tab

NVidia drivers are really quirky, so I reckon it's either a hit or miss

[unique cosmos]

There is no need to be sorry. I just pointed out that the issue likely comes from the non-standard driver package. If you have a Timeshift snapshot from before installing that, it would be prudent to roll back to that. The only recommended way to install nvidia drivers is through Driver Manager.

[smoky comet]

ok, but now I have the 545 driver, same problems. from the Driver Manager

[unique cosmos]

It is possible that some dependency from that foreign package is lodged in your system. There are three ways to get it out:

• manually, which is not something newbies can accomplish (most veterans cannot do that, either)
• by reverting to a Timeshift snapshot from before that installation
• by reinstalling entirely.

[smoky comet]

oh dear new installation :/

[unique cosmos]

Timeshift may not save lives, but it saves you a lot of anguish. Use Timeshift.

[smoky comet]

OK, Is there a way to export data from Mint to save it and then restore it?

[stoic gate]

Google Drive

[unique cosmos]

Your /home directory should hold all your files. There will also be a bunch of "dotfiles", which is literally files that have their names start with a ., which makes them invisible per convention (can be toggled visible in file manager, just like in Windows). The dotfiles contain application settings, and there are also vast dotted directories that applications write their stuff to (both files and caches). You could just copy that all off wholesale and copy it back in on a new install. If you have Steam, be advised that some of its files are weird and will fail to copy, so better exclude that one. You should also skip symlinks.

[smoky comet]

ok thanks 🙂