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It's just annoying. Opening a game in a running session (several hours) will make it perform poorly.
Rebooting the system doubles my FPS, but can't be the solution.
Example:
Game: The Suicide Of Rachel Foster, opened through Steam
Running Session: 30fps, constant framedrops, slow movement
After reboot: 60fps, occasional framedrops
Tried closing all programms, disconnecting network drives. Plasmashell & Xorg occupy half the space after Reboot, but theres 32gb for everything...so.
Has anyone experienced the same & a possible solution?
Thanks dudes and dudettes!
EDIT How to reproduce the lag
Unplugging the Laptop (while in KDE desktop) from power results in a massive performance drop (as intended I guess). (Nvidia Settings - Powermizer - Performance Level 0 and 1)
Plugging the Laptop back in would not restore whole previous performance -> Lag until reboot (Nvidia Settings - Powermizer - Performance Level jumping between 4 and 2)
finally [SOLVED] it:
Found this posting to force Low-Performance Settings, but indeed the same settings (Parameter 0x3) solved my problem with Performance Level jumping and thus creating system lag after plugging the laptop to AC again.
Works as intended: Laptop back on AC - Performance Level 4 constant
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/solved-forcing-maximum-power-saving-on-the-desktop-minimum-power-mode-for-powermizer/30403
Solution:
- edit / create file:
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf(you may choose your favorite texteditor instead of nano)
- edit /paste in file:
Section “Device”Identifier “Device0”
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “NVIDIA Corporation”
Option “Coolbits” “1”
Option “RegistryDwords” “PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3”
EndSection
- reboot
Last edited by eiseneuter on 9 Jan 2021 at 6:26 am UTC
You mentioned network drives. Do you use NFS by chance? A few years ago, had this problem on Debian testing on my laptop. Best I could figure, it looked like NFS was trying to connect/reconnect/find the server and things would wait for it, particularly if I was browsing for files.
Maybe you have a process that's doing a lot of network or IO work? Could be holding things up?
Sadly, I never figured it out and ended up distro hopping (for other reasons), where the problem went away. The network is mostly magic to me.
I hope that gives you a place to look.
Last edited by denyasis on 17 Dec 2020 at 12:28 am UTC
I haven't noticed this recently, but I have been playing less demanding games (currently playing Iratus, for example).
Sadly, I have no solution to offer. I tend to notice that it had more chances of occuring after watching some videos on firefox, so it may be related to hardware decoding, not releasing all resources when done.
As for a network traffic monitor, I didnt find a tool to easily see whats going on. Is there a non command-line-based tool...like a simple gui-monitor?
Ahhh right, it has up-and download columns i didnt recognize ;)
Couldn't solve it yet -_-
17 fps before reboot
60 fps after reboot
Fiddled around with the compositor, but no luck here. No significant network traffic. What processes could slow down the performance in such a manner?
Last edited by eiseneuter on 18 Dec 2020 at 9:21 pm UTC
Throttling due to heat might be a possibility as agreed said.
Or something could be using cpu in the background.
I think there is a process monitor for nvidia, nvidia-smi (I had to Google that). If the nvidia control panel doesn't give anything illuminating in regards to heat or performance level, it might be worth a look.
From the internet searchings, it looks like :
watch -n 0.5 nvidia-smi pmon -c 1
Might be what you need. I won't be near my computer (an older nvidia machine) to check it out in my own, so the usual cautions with CLI commands from some website apply.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for the effort you made to help!
Checked the suggested GPU Monitor and there are three applications that give me values:
- "Overlook-Win64-" most probably the game itself, running with Proton (constant)
- Xorg (occasionally)
- Brave browser (occasionally)
This time, even after the now all-day-session without reboot, the game ran smooth. Kind of surprising, It's hard to recreate the behavior. Will take another look, when it bugs out on me again.
Thanks for the deep look, always learning new things!
Last edited by eiseneuter on 20 Dec 2020 at 1:46 am UTC
Only thing that came to mind this morning, it could be a case of a bug somewhere in the software.
Assuming this happens with other games, it could be some freak bug that pops out when running proton, dxvk, lutris, and game mode.
The nice thing with the translation stack is that most of it is replaceable or optional (hopefully). Depending how deep you want to get, you could try using regular proton or wine, disable ganemode, toggle dxvk, etc.
The downside to trying that is changing all of those may effect performance and stability of your game, so you could end up changing one problem for another, which is more annoying than anything.
As for the suggested values (Temperature, Memory, CPU-, GPU-, Network- usage): it's all ok.
I got a new 144hz monitor not long ago and keep the website www.vsynctester.com always open to see system framerate vs monitor speed. When system lag occurs, the system framerate is always below monitor speed. Still learning here about new technologies, namely display-tech and linux gaming.
Maybe a slight improvement of the lag i got from the Nvidia Settings - Powermizer set to "Prefer Maximum Performance" instead of "Adaptive". The Powermizer is like a energy saving feature for the GPU. But like always with the Nvidia Settings-Tool, the settings don't survive a reboot.
Since the system-lag occurs irregulary, i'm testing what software that i use could cause it. Moonlight, Steam, Electron-Framework, Browser, Cairo Dock...who knows. I hope to find out!
Last edited by eiseneuter on 23 Dec 2020 at 1:14 pm UTC
If it's the whole system, might be worth trying wayland or x11. Honestly though, I'm just guessing at this point, I'm pretty stumped
As for Kwin, I read that it can cause problems. How can i find out, if it crashed or not? Already unchecked "allow applications to disable compositing". Maybe i try a different version with Kwin-git.
Thanks!
Last edited by eiseneuter on 24 Dec 2020 at 2:21 am UTC
From my memory (I'm traveling this week, sorry), there was a red shaded box that basically said something to the effect of "kwin crashed, so it was disabled until you re enable it to maintain stability"
I've used kwin with the opengl 4.x option for the past 2 years with no issues. This was the only crash I've ever had of the window manager. For reference and I'm not sure if it matters, my session is X11, not wayland. Everything on my setup is default.
Perhaps try switching to kwin with the latest opengl and seeing if that changes anything?
The Infocenter tells my my OpenGL Version is 4.6. Well...i can't select it in the compositor settings though.
Last edited by eiseneuter on 27 Dec 2020 at 2:14 am UTC
While observing the 3-second regular spike (lag) at vsynctester.com i killed kwin_x11 and suddenly it was smooth again. The lag returns when starting kwin_x11 again with "kwin --replace", so I can't even do this workaround on the fly, but rather have to reboot or kill kwin every time i fire up a game :S Also I can't imagine any other way to fix this. Wayland? No. Pretty sure by now that it is just the unholy prop. Nvidia drivers.
Last edited by eiseneuter on 4 Jan 2021 at 4:26 pm UTC
Unplugging the Laptop (while in KDE desktop) from power results in a massive performance drop (as intended I guess).
Plugging the Laptop back in would not restore whole previous performance -> Lag until reboot!
-------
Offtopic On a side note, i finally managed to get a smooth desktop experience on a 144hz monitor.
Found that there's a built-in FPS counter for your desktop in the Settings -> Desktop Effects which told me, that despite option 144hz for the monitor in the Display Settings, it was still running on only around 70 fps.
Solution:
- add MaxFPS=144 to ~/.config/kwinrc under section [Compositing]
- disable Vsync in Settings -> Compositor
Last edited by eiseneuter on 5 Jan 2021 at 9:52 am UTC
AC -> Performance Level 4 constant
Battery -> Performance Level 1 constant
AC after Battery -> Performance Level jumping
Check out the video (600 kb) [Powermizer Video](http://surmount.de/privat/powermizer-2021-01-08_17.51.03.mp4)
Last edited by eiseneuter on 9 Jan 2021 at 3:28 am UTC
Found this posting to force Low-Performance Settings, but indeed the same settings (Parameter 0x3) solved my problem with Performance Level jumping and thus creating system lag after plugging the laptop to AC again.
Works as intended: Laptop back on AC - Performance Level 4 constant
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/solved-forcing-maximum-power-saving-on-the-desktop-minimum-power-mode-for-powermizer/30403
Solution:
- edit / create file:
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf(you may choose your favorite texteditor instead of nano)
- edit /paste in file:
Section “Device”Identifier “Device0”
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “NVIDIA Corporation”
Option “Coolbits” “1”
Option “RegistryDwords” “PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3”
EndSection
- reboot
Last edited by eiseneuter on 9 Jan 2021 at 6:22 am UTC