Hey guys, switching from pop OS here. I have tried different proton versions, kernels and disabling the KDE compositor. nothing seems to be working. This was an issue on pop OS so I do not think it is specific to endeavor or Arch. I am hoping to get some assistance and attempt to figure out what the problem is.
I am a bit new to this so please let me know what you need me to run and what information you need from me.
Welcome to the community! 
How did you set up your system for gaming? We have a guide here on the forum that works for many. Linux gaming [Guide]
As for information we may need, please run and post the output of:
inxi -FGA
Yes I followed the guide. I mostly just installed my graphics drivers, installed steam and proton-GE. I switched to the cachyOS kernel in hopes of getting a performance boost and it helped just a little bit but the difference was not really substantial. I made sure to disable the KDE compositor as well.
Thanks for the warm welcome! I have been enjoying Endeavor a ton so far.
System:
Host: void-b250et2 Kernel: 6.8.7-2-cachyos-eevdf arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.0.4 Distro: EndeavourOS
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: BIOSTAR model: B250ET2 serial: <superuser required>
UEFI: American Megatrends v: 5.12 date: 02/09/2017
CPU:
Info: quad core model: Intel Core i5-7500 bits: 64 type: MCP cache:
L2: 1024 KiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 800 min/max: 800/3800 cores: 1: 800 2: 800 3: 800 4: 800
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] driver: nvidia v: 550.76
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.13 with: Xwayland v: 23.2.6 driver: X:
loaded: nvidia unloaded: modesetting gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch resolution:
1: 1920x1080~60Hz 2: 1920x1080
API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: nvidia,swrast
platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 550.76
renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2
API: Vulkan v: 1.3.279 drivers: nvidia surfaces: xcb,xlib
Audio:
Device-1: Intel 200 Series PCH HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: NVIDIA GP106 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-3: Kingston HyperX 7.1 Audio
driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
API: ALSA v: k6.8.7-2-cachyos-eevdf status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.5 status: active
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: enp2s0 state: down mac: b8:97:5a:f5:c0:76
Device-2: Ralink RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter driver: rt2800usb
type: USB
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 00:c0:ca:aa:41:f8
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 4.77 TiB used: 2.61 TiB (54.7%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WD10EZEX-08M2NA0
size: 931.51 GiB
ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Seagate model: ST4000NM0035-1V4107 size: 3.64 TiB
ID-3: /dev/sdc vendor: Toshiba model: TL100 size: 223.57 GiB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 515.92 GiB used: 27.91 GiB (5.4%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb1
Swap:
Alert: No swap data was found.
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 42.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 42 C
Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A gpu: nvidia fan: 25%
Info:
Memory: total: 16 GiB available: 15.58 GiB used: 3.24 GiB (20.8%)
Processes: 219 Uptime: 14m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34
If it’s happening on al lthese distros it might be a hardware problem, does it not happen on windows with the same card? Have you tested it?
Also this is (very much of) a long shot but you could try using nouveau and nvk(+zink) to see if you have any more luck there.
It is anecdotal but 550.76 nvidia drivers cause stutter and crashes for me so I had to downgrade to 550.67.
Maybe you could try previous driver versions.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t happen on windows. If I’m getting 110 FPS on a game in windows, I get 50 FPS on Linux with stuttering. sometimes the stuttering goes away depending on the game but the FPS remains low. I think if it was a hardware issue then it would be unplayable on windows too, but it isn’t.
One thing I have noticed is that shaders or textures look different on Linux than they do on windows. Not sure if this is something that could help find the issue.
Well, what games do you play? Since your card is fairly old, pushing on 10 years now, it’s possible that solutions we found for Linux gaming are a bit too much for the card. Vulkan is a pretty recent development and I’m not sure how well baked it was back in 2016.
Guild Wars 2 mostly, that has been running well since it is more of a CPU heavy game. I play Hunt Showdown and that gets half the FPS in windows. Most games I have tried to play new or old get half the FPS that they get in windows, but maybe you’re right. It could just be the card not being well supported by Linux solutions, it is possible.
I fear that might be the case. It is what happened with my hardware until I got a modern laptop with a 3050 in it and I had the ability to actually play everything on Linux. Some games worked fine, since they were really simple, but some more difficult titles required me to switch to Windows to have decent performance. It’s unfortunate really, but yeah…
I have a laptop with a 3060 (I usually game on my desktop regardless), I think I will try gaming on that with linux and see how it turns out.
Well there is one last thing i think nobody mentioned, did you try setting your cpu governor to performance?
I am using gamemode with my games, doesn’t it already do that? If not, how can I set it?
It should be yeah.
You can check with cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Just checked it, it is on performance with gamemode. I think it is either an issue with the driver or that my GPU is just too old, which I doubt since I get low performance with games that people get normal performance with using the same GPU. Not really sure what else I can try here.
Like i said, try with nouveau using nvk (that’s the vulkan-nouveau and lib32-vulkan-nouveau packages)for vulkan and zink for opengl applications. It’s a bit of a long shot maybe, but it is worth a try, those drivers may be new but they seem to be surprisingly good for a lot of games.
I suspect that maybe because your card is old nvidia has neglected support for it and you need to downgrade the drivers to an older version to fix it.
the 550 drivers have a lot of problems too even on new cards.
If you wanna try downgrading, assuming you’ve had the installation for a while and at some point had older drivers, you can go to /var/cache/pacman/pkg and install older packages from there, if not you could try the aur nvidia packages like nvidia-535xx-dkms or maybe even as far back as 470 or 390.
It is a fresh installation so no older drivers. I will figure out how to downgrade and try nouveau using nvk. I suspected the drivers but wanted to avoid the hassle of downgrading haha. I guess I will go through them and see what works best, thanks a lot for the help!
When downgrading the drivers, should I downgrade the nvidia-utils and things like that too?
You might have to yeah.