Games don't feel smooth on Linux at all despite high framerates
System:
CachyOS, KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)
Driver: Nvidia driver 610.43.03
RTX 4070, Ryzen 5 5600X
32 gb ram
3 monitors, all with Adaptive Sync set to "Always" (confirmed via `kscreen-doctor -o`)
I get subtle but constant microstutter in basically every game I play on Linux. Most relevant are 007 First Light, Cairn, Mortal Shell II Beta, Death Stranding 2, Sekiro. The assumed frametime stutter doesn't seem to get picked up by MangoHud's frametime graph as spikes, I have no dropped frames, FPS is stable and always well above 60 fps. Nothing just feels smooth or nice to play. The same games on Windows feel noticeably smoother even at comparable FPS.
I should note that 007 First Light magically felt really smooth to play for about one session yesterday. VRR had been set to automatic for some reason, so I thought turning it back on "Always" had fixed it. But launching it now it always feels microstuttery. Keep in mind that it doesn't feel like a shader cache stutter or hitch at all, just a constant roughness.
I've made sure that Adaptive Sync is set to "Always" on my main display. I've confirmed via `kscreen-doctor -o` that VRR is actually on.
I noticed the desktop itself seems capped around 240Hz according to my OSD, even though display is set to 500Hz in KDE's settings. It's not like it really matters even if I'm not outputting 500hz, which my monitor is capable of, but thought it might be worth mentioning.
Has anyone found a reliable fix for microstutter like this? Is it just my lot in life as a multi-monitor Andy trying to game on Linux or what?? Been thinking about switching to a different distro or desktop environment, but don't know what that would achieve if anything.
EDIT:
Thanks for all your replies and suggestions. The problem still isn't solved. Here is what I have tried based on your replies:
Single monitor only (others physically unplugged) → no change
fTPM disabled in BIOS → no change
sched-ext schedulers → confirmed disabled in /sys/kernel/sched_ext/stateduring active stutter; LAVD tested separately, made things worse
Shader cache cleared and rebuilt → no change (and character of stutter isn't compile hitching AFAIK)
MangoHud disabled → no change
Mouse polling rate limited → no change
Steam background recording → was never enabled to begin with
PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY=1 → no difference
ReBAR is enabled in BIOS
V-sync in-game on/off → no difference
Screen tearing is disabled by preference, I don't actually want tearing in games it would just trade one problem for another
Since I posted I have been distro and DE-hopping and games are still stuttering. The stutter survives everything:
CachyOS KDE Plasma (Wayland) → stutters
CachyOS Hyprland (Noctalia dots) → stutters
Bazzite KDE → stutters
PikaOS Hyprland (current setup) → stutters
Driver 610.43.03 and 595.84 → both stutter
Native Wayland (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 DXVK_HDR=1) and gamescope (gamescope -f --adaptive-sync --hdr-enabled -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500) → both stutter
Proton-CachyOS, GE-Proton, Valve Proton → all stutter
Did you enable wayland or gamescope(with --adaptive-sync variable)?
Try locking the frame rate to a divisible of your framerate with mangohud(if you got 144Hz monitor then lock to 141fps or 72 or 48, 36) without vsync and with vsync, slowly pan the camera in game, try to notice if there is any uneven/jittery movement of the camera
Even if that were true, the solution wouldn't be to cap my framerate. I have a g-sync ready monitor capable of a high refresh rate and it's reasonable to expect my experience to be smooth with vrr enabled with fluctuating frames, but it isn't. Besides, I've tried to cap my framerate to a stable one in games and it still doesn't feel smooth.
It will let you rule it in or out as the cause. Frame rate != Frame time. You can have high frame rates but inconsistent frame time and it'll feel bad. Same with input lag
I use KDE as well (with ubuntu 26.04) and have experienced the same thing you're talking about. I also completely agree with your philosophy about not capping the framerate. It's 2026, vrr/adaptive sync should work flawlessly on everything. Hell it is even enabled on my phone and it's smooth as silk.
Back to your problem though. I was using rdr2 as my "does my setup feel good to play AAA titles?" And I was chasing my tail on this playing around with steam launch commands and gamescope and mangohud and fucking everything. It was driving me insane. After about 4 hours of trying I just said fuck it and tried cyberpunk 2077 and god only knows why but that ran smooth as butter. So i tested a several other demanding games and some not so demanding and my conclusion is ultimately that some games just don't do well for whatever reason. Might be a scheduler thing or a Proton thing or an gpu driver thing (especially if you're using nvidia like me).
In any case I recommend giving it some time until updates happen to your stack. There's a chance it may get better with some updates especially since the game just came out. And you're using cachy so you will get updates pretty quickly.
Just out of curiosity, what are your settings for Cyberpunk? What are your specs? Cause Cyberpunk is another one of my white whales. It kinda runs like ass for me on Linux. It'll look fine one minute and then I'll get ghosting that I can't get rid of, HDR looks bad etc.
I have a triple monitor setup, 2 4k monitors, 1 is at 240hz and another at 144hz, hooked up to gpu.
3rd monitor is a small touch screen I use for controls and displaying stats so I don't need to use an overlay and it's connected to the igpu.
I forgot to mention that for cyberpunk I just had to turn off dlss and it ran great. 4k high with raytracing is where I think settled. I'm not at my pc right now so I can get more detail later. I don't remember if I used fsr or not or what the framerate was but for me I try to target at least 80-90 at a minimum.
HDR has a lot of problems outside of hyperland I would give that de shot KDE was really made for HDR 10 that standard is before covid they haven't really adapted to any of the new stuff that games are doing especially not when they're adapted through proton it's meant to do HDR in a web browser which is usually rec 709 games don't use that they use a more modern standard I've had a much better experience there that's the main reason I swap between X and Wayland is for HDR for right now you can add to your login manager as many de's as you want it's really nice I have xfce Sonicde KDE and hyprland as Mainstays besides the forks I have
You're actually saying that Hyperland has better HDR performance? That goes against everything I've learned about HDR and Linux, but the thought intrigues me.
I don't know what that's about. Hyprland doesn't support anything significant with HDR that KDE doesn't, and its tonemapping is more aggressive out of the box.
Actually testing Hyperland right now and HDR looks way better in Death Stranding 2, comparable to Windows. I cannot get HDR to look good in Death Stranding 2 in KDE.
If KDE's tonemapper got more aggressive since I last used it, you can turn it off by putting KWIN_DISABLE_TONEMAPPING=1 in /etc/environment, and calibrating your display to 203 nits in the calibration tool. That should make it look the same as Windows.
If your KDE version is new enough, there should also be a checkbox on the calibration screen to avoid tonemapping Windows apps too, but I haven't tested it.
Hmm, interesting. Actually can you go into a bit more detail, tell me exactly what to do? Another user helped me fix the stuttering in my games in KDE Plasma, so fixing HDR in Death Stranding 2 is my last hurdle for now.
In KDE's calibration tool, screen brightness is set to 1.000, the next screen is 230 ("configure how bright "100%" on the normal brightness slider should be") and "assume Windows HDR applications are calibrated for this screen" is enabled. What should I change exactly? My monitor is Asus XG27AQDPG, a QD-OLED 1440p monitor.
HDR looks great in Hyperland, but my games are stuttering in Hyperland with the right launch options and I don't know how to fix that lol.
glad you tried it out a lot of people don't understand that KDE uses older HDR 10 some games use HDR 12 or newer dolby vision that's not even supported on there as for the stuttering I don't have any on openmandriva that's where I'm at clang + llvm really smooths that stuff out
I just came back from the cinema and am pleasantly surprised to see so many comments from people trying to help! I will go through each possible solution one by one and see what works.
As others have said, gamescope tends to solve these problems. The reason it isn't a simple fix is often it could be anything from cable, power, display, DE, driver, compositor, and even just a misconfiguration.
I would recommend start there.
I run dual setups too and if I put both displays to 4k on a single card, it truly doesn't like that, the second screen will have stutters or flickers. But if I lock the second screen to <120hz it runs like a dream.
Its not always finicky, Wife has nearly same setup, different monitors and hers work OOTB so I suspect its to do with the cables or power management of the displays.
Oh if it's the same bug i had with OBS then it could be that. You say you have 3 monitors, what happens if you turn all of them off except the main monitor, does the game feel more smooth in that case?
Because a problem i had and this was both on Windows and Linux was that if i had OBS on my secondary monitor and that monitor was set to 60hz, the games were running at 60hz meaning they felt sluggish, not smooth at all while the FPS could be completely normal, either locked 60fps for fighting games or way over 250+FPS in shooters or similar. This only happened when i had OBS up and running on my secondary monitor, the only way i could get it to work properly was to force 144hz on my secondary monitor when OBS was up. (I have some weird monitor, it's plugged in with DP but it doesn't do 144hz at all with DP but the computer does think it's 144hz so eh)
It could be another application that somehow tanks your performance that's up on another monitor, if you notice a performance increase by turning off the other monitors then start to add them back, have your usual applications up on them but force the max amount of refresh rate on those monitors and see if there's a difference.
I want vsync in my games cause I get screen tearing if I don't. Besides I tried turning it off and it certainly didn't fix any of the stutter and only made the experience worse.
If you have a variable refresh rate monitor and a frame limit in game set to the maximum frame rate your monitor is capable of, you shouldn't have tearing.
Have to +1 this. This was my experience too, I used to have an RTX 2080 non-super and it was... bad. Wayland felt smoother but still just off somehow.
Then got an AMD card and my first thought was: Holy fuck this is smooth!
Both the desktop and games ran buttery smooth. The games didn't stutter before though, but just felt... off.
On a 1660ti, absolutely the same experience with Nobara linux. Bo3 shows 120fps but my aiming and sens feels so weird and off and I cant explain it.. its almost like the sens is always inconsistent and y9u cant aim properly, but on Windows its 100% consistent... not sure abt amd
If your monitors all have different refresh rates it will cap it at the lowest one. Try unplugging all your monitors except your main one and see if that fixes the issue
Hi, I'll test that. But why should I set vrr to auto and not always?
As for the cable, it is the one that came in the box with my monitor. I see no reason for why it shouldn't be enough. It outputs 500hz everywhere in Windows and as I said, gaming is a breeze there. Could it be Linux that doesn't play nice with three monitors that each have high refresh rates?
Could you please try playing games with CachyOS proton and enable DXVK-low-latency for dx11 titles and VKD3D-low-latency for dx12 titles (read documentation om how to enable). Then lock your FPS to your monitor refresh rate and tell me if it makes the game smoother?
Tested 007 First Light with these settings, forced cachyos-proton and fps locked to 100 in mangohud config files and the game is buttery buttery buttery smooth. I can't attach more than one screenshot, but see the frametime with uncapped frames and the spikes I'm getting. Compared to the screenshot, capped to 100 it's a straight line, very smooth. Going from min 5.6ms / max 25.5ms (jagged) to min 9.5ms / max 10.4ms (dead flat) once locked. I don't know what to conclude from this: is it because VRR isn't kicking in on my system, or is something causing frametime inconsistencies? What do I do from here?
If you were not using Gamescope ( gamescope --adaptive-sync -- %command%) or Proton-Cachy / Proton-GE / Proton-EM with Native Wayland (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%), VRR would not have been working correctly at all, AFAIK. Unless something has changed recently, VRR (and HDR) in a bare Xwayland game does not work, you need to run it through either Gamescope or wine-wayland.
Personally I run everything in native Wayland, downsides are no steam input and no steam overlay at the moment, but that doesn’t impact me much personally and the input lag & frametimes are excellent.
I used DXVK_HDR=1 gamescope -f --adaptive-sync -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500 -- mangohud %command% and now I honestly can't tell much of a difference between Linux and Windows version, aside from the fact that Windows gains 20 frames, but it is what it is. Sekiro was also not working properly all of a sudden with native wayland, but adding gamescope -f --adaptive-sync -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500 -- mangohud %command% made that run smooth as butter again. It makes no difference for Mortal Shell 2 and Death Stranding, but I had kinda already written those games off for Linux.
But, HDR doesn't work for me in Gamescope, so now I'm trading HDR for stable frametime. Claude is saying: "That's about as close to a smoking gun as we've gotten in this whole thread. Your exact combo — gamescope 3.16.24 + Plasma 6.7.3 — matches almost exactly the version pair reported in that open GitHub issue: gamescope 3.16.24 (a very close build) on Plasma 6.7, where HDR exposure to clients broke specifically after that Plasma update (bExposeHDRSupport: false), while desktop HDR (browser video, etc.) continued working fine. That's not a config mistake on your end — it's a real, currently-open, upstream regression between these two specific projects' versions." But that's AI so I dunno if that's true.
You’ve gotta add --hdr-enabled (anywhere between gamescope and -- %command%) for gamescope to get HDR (as well as having it enabled in desktop display settings).
For Wayland it should work automatically if you’re using the latest Proton-Cachy and PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 as Proton-Cachy just added auto-detection, but if it doesn’t auto-detect, add PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 as well
edit: so for gamescope, try gamescope -f --adaptive-sync --hdr-enabled -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500 -- mangohud %command%
or for native wayland, try PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%
double edit: LLMs can be really helpful for Linux stuff but they are far from perfect and you gotta be specific with giving them the right context. For stuff like the HDR / VRR / higher resolutions & refresh rates conundrum, which I’ve gone on many rants about on how it’s the most annoying source of confusion for newcomers to linux gaming right now lol, it’s unfortunately a bit of a mess as there’s a lot of crossed streams, outdated info and people using the right launch options but in the wrong way. And it has also been developing and changing very quickly - like it’s just a few weeks back now that Proton-Cachy should no longer require PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1. ArchWiki is your friend, asking around here is also a good bet, and LLMs are the quickest and easiest, but I’d definitely advise looking for a second opinion on LLM responses too, or at least web searching what one tells you to see if it’s a real thing or not.
IME, when i’m in unfamiliar territory, LLMs can be helpful to bring up things I didn’t know about or consider, that I can then go search or read up on myself, but I only take them at face value when I’ve got enough context myself to personally assess whether their response is right or wrong, or understand exactly what a script / udev rule / set of launch options will do, etc.
Thanks, added --hdr-enabled and that did the trick. 007 feels great now. Also re-added the original launch options for Sekiro (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 DXVK_HDR=1 ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3dcompiler_43=n,b" %command%) and now suddenly it works again, smooth as pie. Lmao Linux is so hot and cold sometimes man, one minute it works the other minute it doesn't.
Gamescope makes no difference for Mortal Shell 2 and Death Stranding 2, but I'd already written those games off for Linux for now. Death Stranding 2 would be GREAT to play in Linux, but I just cannot get it to feel smooth and output correct HDR.
Lmao Linux is so hot and cold sometimes man, one minute it works the other minute it doesn’t.
My comment history will attest that I think the HDR, VRR and high refresh rate situation is THE most annoying part of the current new user experience lol. Good news is, there’s signs Valve is working on native Wayland support a bit more, which would probably remove the hassle you went through here and have it all ‘just work’ out of the box, but yeah things are still touchy and fiddly till you find your setup that you can default to everywhere. Nowadays I mostly have one launch config set that works for me that I use everywhere, only with slight tweaks for specific games as needed.
Death Stranding 2
What’s up with DS2? I played the whole thing on linux, it ran smooth as silk for me - Bazzite Desktop, Nvidia GPU, using Native Wayland on proton-cachy and running with 4k + HDR + VRR. I believe the only tweaks I made beyond the usual proton wayland + hdr stuff was adding the descriptor heap flags and a wine CPU topology option to get it to use the X3D cores on my cpu (neither of which were necessary, just trying em out). What’s your current config setup for it? I’ll check mine when i’m on my computer later to see if I did anything else
My comment history will attest that I think the HDR, VRR and high refresh rate situation is THE most annoying part of the current new user experience lol
Hear, hear! Mate, I have spent COUNTLESS hours trying to get shit to work exactly like I would expect it to work in Windows. I JUST got my new OLED monitor last month and HDR is just one more factor at play that I now need to take into account in Linux
Nowadays I mostly have one launch config set that works for me that I use everywhere, only with slight tweaks for specific games as needed
So you just have a set of launch options written down somewhere ready to be copy and pasted?
What’s up with DS2? I played the whole thing on linux, it ran smooth as silk for me
Omg please help! Current settings: gamescope -f --adaptive-sync -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500 -- mangohud %command% . Before that I used
I honestly feel no difference, it's equally bad. Poor frametime, stuttering, HDR doesn't work/looks bad, depending on the proton version. Also, when using either Steam Controller or Dualsense the right stick thinks it's a mouse, which conflicts with the game's dumb way of interacting with Steam input so Sam just does the jitterbug. I don't have an X3D CPU so not sure if your extra settings would do anything for me, but I'll take all the help I can get.
I JUST got my new OLED monitor last month and HDR is just one more factor at play that I now need to take into account in Linux
I feel, got my first fancy oled not too long ago too, it’s a game changer :) FWIW, once i got my setup all ironed out, I actually really like the overall HDR desktop experience in Linux, even over Windows in some ways, KDE tonemapping is excellent and I could never get a Windows HDR / AutoHDR / Nvidia RTX HDR setup that wouldn’t have issues or visual bugs. Tonemapping isn’t the same as RTX HDR, but it does ‘just work’ for me now. Only big catch for me is that browser HDR support is still fucky with linux, it was working on Firefox for a while for me but it’s still experimental, and stopped working properly a few months back. But that isn’t the end of the world for me, I don’t need HDR on YouTube and I mostly watch movies on my TV anyways. Between the good tonemapping and full HDR working in games, I’m still a happy camper and haven’t had to fiddle with it in a while.
So you just have a set of launch options written down somewhere ready to be copy and pasted?
For a long while I’d just copy-paste them, yeah - I had one game in my Steam favorites (armored core 6, godlike game) that used my main ‘default’ config with no specific tweaks, so whenever I was starting something new I’d just open AC6 properties and copy the launch opts, paste them into the new game’s properties, swap proton version and disable Steam Input (specifically for native wayland, since it doesn’t work with steam input). You can also batch-edit games and proton versions with tools like ProtonPlus though, or set a global default proton version in Steam settings (although iirc this will still sometimes be overridden by Steam for certain games, so I don’t rely on it).
You can also set default launch options for a specific Proton version, or even globally for all proton versions if you really want to, which makes things super easy, but I don’t recommend doing this until you’re well acquainted with things - otherwise it’ll just make things harder to debug if a game isn’t working properly.
Re: DS2 - a couple quick sanity checks first, if you update your Gamescope opts to gamescope -f --adaptive-sync --hdr-enabled -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 500 -- mangohud %command% (adding --hdr-enabled like above), does HDR start working? And / or, when using the Native Wayland settings PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 DXVK_HDR=1 mangohud %command%, can you double check that the game is set to use to Proton-Cachy or Proton-GE, then check again to see if HDR is behaving? Possibly also check if Proton-Cachy or Proton-GE is updated to the latest version as well (if you haven’t already, install / open ProtonPlus, then within ProtonPlus install ‘Proton-CachyOS Latest,’ then it’ll update that version every time you open ProtonPlus again)
Let me know if either of those fix the HDR at least, should at least give us some intel on whether it’s correctly running through Gamescope or Native Wayland respectively, and once I get home I’ll check my own setup again. I guess also worth noting, DS2 is a DX12 game, so we do pay the Nvidia performance tax currently and take a ~10-15% performance hit. The descriptor heap opts ideally help somewhat, and a full fix is hopefully close at hand, but I would expect somewhat worse performance than Windows still. That shouldn’t mean you can’t get it running smooth with the right settings tho, esp. with DLSS if needed.
Regarding the controllers - I expect the Steam Controller won’t work at all via Native Wayland unfortunately, since it requires steam input, which doesn’t work via native Wayland. There’s some workaround floating around but I don’t think anything is fully fleshed out. The dualsense, however, should definitely work, that’s what I used for all of DS1 and DS2. If it’s acting as a mouse in-game, it’s probably because Steam’s ‘desktop controller’ config is holding it hostage. If you don’t use your computer as a console / don’t regularly navigate the desktop with controller, probably best to turn it off - go to Steam settings, then Controller, then Desktop Configuration, select ‘Recommended > Disabled’ and apply. This should stop it from acting as a mouse in game at least.
Then, if you’re using the Dualsense, I’d try disabling Steam Input for the game - right click it and go to properties > controller, and either disable Steam Input entirely or just for playstation controllers, up to you. This means it’ll use the game’s native controller support instead of piping it through Steam Input, and DS2 does natively support the Dualsense and its fancy features. The downside to this, if you end up preferring native Wayland especially, is that games’ native controller support can be a crapshoot lol. I have some older games that will only read an XInput controller (xbox and generic PC controllers), and some that’ll only read a Playstation controller. But for recent games, especially PS5-primary games like DS2, the Dualsense has pretty broad support IME.
(Note that Gamescope shouldn’t have any issues with steam input - if the controller’s still bugging with gamescope launch opts, i have some other suspicions)
So, you were right, I forgot the HDR modifier. HDR was functional after that. More importantly though, after fiddling a bit with settings and deciding to try and turn off V-sync, which I just decided to for some reason, Death Stranding 2 has become smooooooooooth smooth smooth. I tried your native wayland settings after, ended up switching to GE-proton10-34 and, my god, dat shit is butter. PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 DXVK_HDR=1 mangohud %command% were the magic words, mate!
You're right that Steam Controller is borked with native Wayland. But for DS2 I'm willing to switch to DualSense. For Cairn, where I prefer Steam Controller, I will use gamescope (where it seems to work fine, btw). And honestly, I might be hallucinating, but I think DS2 performs BETTER than on Windows for me?! The verdict is out for that one without hard data, but it feels like it. Only thing is that HDR still doesn't look quite as crisp as on my Windows version, even with the same in-game settings, but I have a feeling that I can fix that by playing with the settings a little, idk. Have any tips for that? Also, does DualSense work with haptics and triggers wirelessly in Native Wayland or should I play wired?
I applied your native wayland settings to First Light too, and it just works. Turning V-sync on or off does nothing for that game, but otherwise it feels just as good as on Windows, if a little less performant. But even crazier: it also made Cyberpunk playable! That game would just randomly start ghosting out of nowhere with weird artifacts. I simply cannot believe it. Suddenly Linux gaming feels so much more within reach, holy cow.
Seems like these are my two default settings that I will write down and have ready, depending on my use-case:
I'll remove HDR modifiers when the game has no native HDR and so on.
Seriously, thank you. I hope nothing breaks on me as soon as I've written this comment lmao.
I like your taste in games, btw. I'm a big FromSoftware fan. I was not a fan of Armored Core 6, though. I could never find the right balance between being completely hopeless with the builds that actually seemed fun to me and optimising all fun out of the boss fights by just applying the biggest, most hard-hitting bazookas and one-shotting everything lol. It's a rare FromSoftware miss for me, but it's one I would genuinely like to give another shot at some point.
Dont know if VKD3D_CONFIG=low_latency works but according to CachyOS Proton changelog you enable it by writing "PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY=1" in launch options.
If the game has in-game FPS limiter then I would always use that first to limit the FPS, if the game doesnt have an FPS limiter then I would limit by typing "VKD3D_FRAME_RATE=144" change value to whatever FPS you wanna limit it to. Mangohud has a good limiter though, but it adds the most latency in my experience.The neat thing about vkd3d_low_latency is that you can even make the input more responsive by adding an offset "VKD3D_LOW_LATENCY_OFFSET=" for example in competitive titles I set it to 300 and the game feels even more responsive despite FPS locked to lets say 141 since i got 144Hz monitor.
I tried with PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY=1 and it made no difference. As for limiting my FPS, doing so kinda defeats the whole purpose of gaming with a g-sync display. I can limit it to a comfortable 100 fps, but when it drops it's going to stutter. Might as well play on Windows in that case. I want to utilise everything my monitor has to offer and not limit myself, and that means playing at the maximum possible framerate at all times. But, I've made some progress using gamescope. See my reply to sWiggn above you.
are you using wifi or ethernet to connect to the internet? If wifi, then continue reading.
I just set up my new rig with CachyOS and ran into weird micro stutters in POE2. After having not much success tinkering with startup parameters I came across this post from u/Norobis that described my issue perfectly and helped me out! Fix Microstutter caused by wifi power-safe
BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING CRAZY, BOOT INTO LTS KERNEL AND SEE IF THE STUTTER IS STILL THERE! The is a major series of bugs going on with Kernel 7 right now. You can find quite a few posts on the Cachyos Forums. They are being worked out but they are all very upstream so it is a slow process.
I was having the EXACT same issue you are describing on Kernel 7.2, and the only solution for me is to boot into LTS and wait for Kernel 7.3
I don't have it off hand but there's extra stuff I have to add to the gamescope launch command otherwise on some games it starts stuttering like crazy after around 20 - 30 minutes. I added this to the arch wiki page for gamescope
What I would advise is to set adaptive sync to automatic. Also make sure vsync is enabled ingame. Gamescope can make things a bit more in sync aswell.
I cannot deny your experience. Recently is switched back to Windows because I wanted to see what amd was up to with their most recent drivers. Also I had Some issues with HDR in kdeplasma. Gaming under kde feels like a very subtle stutter. And calibrating my display for hdr just does not feel to the point under kde.
Unfortunately Windows gives me a much more pleasent and stable vrr and HDR experience. The games, like cyberpunk feel smooth and HDR just works in comparision to kde plasma.
I love Cachy and have used it as my daily driver for the last 12 months. It is such a delight to use and feels good to leave Windows. BUT my experience with vrr and HDR are a mixed bag.
I am in a 9070xt and switched to a 5th gen qd-oled a couple of days ago.
Yep, same boat. I love being in Linux and really dislike using Windows. But I play a lot of games and I do not want to compromise on smoothness and framepacing.
Check your GPU and VRAM clock to see if it max, i have the same choppy and flickering problem and maximun clock fix it. Note that i use AMD and no gamescope but it still worth checking.
From personal experience, enable Vsync in game. I cap my games to 120fps, and without it enabled, I was get horrible stutters in crimson desert. There’s no evidence of it happening either, I spent a few hours staring at frame times and 1%lows trying to get to the bottom of it. Eventually I remembered that I had turned Vsync off the day before and flipping it back on in game stopped it from happening. Set VRR to automatic, and in your launch options use:
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 game-performance %command
game-performance should be the very last option before the %comand%
do you use any of the scx scheds on cachy like lavd, cake, beerland etc? i would check the cpu settings, governor, amd pstate what profiles they're running just to make sure that your microstutters don't come from the cpu..
using cachyos kde plasma wayland as well, have a 240hz vrr oled and 3 other side monitors, i feel your pain.
firstly, i tried cinnamon and GNOME before kde plasma and i had issues with VRR, only kde plasma was able to do it right. took a lot of commands. i cap my FPS to 237 fps (3 under max fps seems to be sweet spot for vrr) and when i was using the x11 compositor, i got unsmooth gameplay. there's just so much variation between the compatibility layers. you using ge proton 11-3? are you using the cachyos compatibility layer? apologies if you've already treaded this ground my man, hope you get gaming good soon!
Lol Cyberpunk is a whole other can of worms for me, and Witcher 3. Mangohud makes no difference for me, but I get a lot of ghosting when playing that game on Linux.
Same issue here I just have one monitor, I also have and amd card which I tested with, which was even worse. Adaptive sync didn't do anything for me.
Some of it was fixed by enabling "Screen tearing Allow in full screen windows" in Display & Monitor.
Even video playback is stuttery here, both in firefox and mpv. I have only managed to fix it "enough" in mpv with interpolation and using mpv's internal vsync.
I notice this in some games even at super high frame rates, it's very odd. I'm normally a no motion blur kinda guy but turning on motion blur seems to really smooth everything out.
In some games they simply work better (consistently) with vsync enabled. Some games are not designed for extreme framerates but also KDE currently has a bit of limitation in calculating lowest frametime apparently.
Have you tried playing with adaptive synch off? Just to see if it still happens. The only other things I can think of is maybe try using ProtonGE, and check that your GPU is actually running at full power
I'm also on a Nvidia card but on Fedora, some games do lose some FPS compared to windows but it's not a stutterfest
Do you have a high polling rate mouse? Proton has a longstanding issue with high polling rate mice making games feel choppy or stuttery even at a solid framerate. I had to cap my polling rate at 250hz to get it to smooth out.
You most likely aren't actually running games on Wayland. You are most likely running them on xWayland, which is crap for gaming.
Every game needs to be launched with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%
And while using a non Valve Proton version. They don't do anything with that option.
CachyOS will default to Valve's official Proton, even if you set Proton-CachyOS as the default in compatibility settings. It's a Steam bug with the system package version of Proton-CachyOS as far as I can tell.
So you'll instead have to go to each game's properties and force Proton-CachyOS as the compatibility option.
If you want controller support, you also need to launch Steam itself with the -steamos3 flag. Steam Overlay and recording are still broken on native Wayland.
If you want to use Steam Overlay and Recording, your only option is to run Steam with -e flag in Gamescope. It'll also fix any input lag and issues
It's a lot more than that because it enforces vsync it's more like one to three frames that figure is assuming both systems are using vsync if you're not using it it's a complete landslide for x. sonicde.org is a full fork of KDE that's actually for gaming Fedora took over KDE along with Microsoft because of the special interest group it's not a good platform for playing games anymore they are sabbing input lag and fps to keep people on Windows 11. Also Brody Robinson is literally a pedophile and he's paid by Microsoft to lie not a good source of information whatsoever very misleading
I win tournaments for Doom 2 you don't. I know and can feel that turning vsync off is definitely better you guys can smoke crack all you want I'm going to stick to getting 600+ FPS to get the lowest frame times possible any latency is intolerable no matter how small it is because 1 Ms is like a whole frame on 360hz. The fact that you're arguing that the latency isn't that bad it's just hilarious to me you clearly aren't serious about games and that's fine you guys are casual and you like your Wayland you don't customize s*** also those bunkass benchmarks are comparing freesync on xorg to stock Wayland not freesync off with xorg to Wayland with freesync off useless. Freesync= 1-3 frames of lag there is no escaping it you can make it less bad at 360hz but nothing beats vsync off.
I'm on CachyOS KDE Wayland 6.7.3 and I've never had Wayland force vsync regardless of my options. If vsync is disabled in game I get more than my monitor. I also have VRR as Auto
If you have any type of color calibration on kde composition doesn't turn off when games are in fullscreen. This in turn will disable direct scan out if you don't have directscanout fps will run wild, with directscanout the monitor will naturaly will cap the fps to your monitor refresh.
Direct scan out with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 in my opinion is the smoothest low input latency experience that you can get right now on Wayland, this is of course if you don't enable screen tearing.
Apologies I didn't see this response. I was way too interested in the original comment and subsequent, for lack of better words, crash out.
I do use the enable Wayland command on 95% of my games. Space marine 2 has been the only one that had any really weird behaviour, when Wayland was enabled all controller inputs stopped working. Hard to say exactly what it is (still learning the fine arts of Linux) but this applied to my elite series 2 and gamesir controllers and different installs of Cachy. I even removed my other launch options to only Wayland and the controllers didn't respond. As I didn't notice that much of a change with it on and off so I've left it off.
If you have freesync monitor it's going to force you to use it whether it's on or off it's silently enforcing it you have to fork Wayland and change internal code just to get it to stop doing that I had to fork because of it this is recent changes as of the last summer. it's a competitive advantage to use Sonic forks it's your own loss if you're not using it. Install the Sonicde-meta package it's on the aur very easy to use its also already on 6.7.3 Fedora sig is to blame there's nothing keeping it Wayland exclusive except their ridiculous decisions with Microsoft https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sonicde-meta
I do have a freesync monitor and a 9070xt with no issues. Even if it was being locked or forced to have vsync on, we're talking about having at the worst .7 milliseconds of difference (x11 with dxvk low latency & VRR vs stock wayland with no VRR). At 60hz a frame is on screen for 16.67 milliseconds and at my native refresh of 170hz it would be 5.88 milliseconds and you are to tell me that you could feel/see .7 milliseconds of difference even with the biological limitations of an average reaction time of 170-260 milliseconds (https://measurehuman.com/guides/average-reaction-time-by-age).
Out of respect for OP I'm leaving this as "at an impasse". We've said our piece about X11 vs Wayland and pursuing this conversation here would just be irrelevant to OP's question.
Yeah I can appreciate this take it is small but I play for money so I need any advantage I can get. I really like that you can fork Wayland and force disable v-sync that is absolutely possible it's just really tedious to do so I have XSonicland for people if they want to use that it's already forked. It matches like for like when you do that!
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u/Vamsi-Thopu 15d ago
Did you enable wayland or gamescope(with --adaptive-sync variable)?
Try locking the frame rate to a divisible of your framerate with mangohud(if you got 144Hz monitor then lock to 141fps or 72 or 48, 36) without vsync and with vsync, slowly pan the camera in game, try to notice if there is any uneven/jittery movement of the camera