Poor gaming performance on Intel

General system Gaming, sound and video
21

Removing nvidia-open-dkms would likely stop that from happening, as it’s the integration of this driver into the kernel that’s taking that time during either a kernel update, or Nvidia driver update.

This command will remove that driver, and the other bits:

yay -R nvidia-open-dkms nvidia-settings nvidia-utils

You might clean up orphan packages too, to help clean up any leftovers after removal:

yay -Yc
22

That was easier than I expected it to be. Thank you very much!

23

Hi Spook, welcome to Linux, Endeavour and the forum!

I am not knowledgeable like Dalto and the rest, so my perspective always still feels like “from a beginner”. I always try to understand stuff and then dumb them down enough to make sense for the regular folk.

Endeavour is “basically Arch Linux”. So when it comes to packages, it will use pacman as a manager - yay is a helper with AUR option as well.

In this case on how to install, update or remove packages, I’d suggest reading the Arch Wiki / Yay guides as that will give you a general understanding across the board in case you haven’t yet.

When it comes to the performance issues, I understand you have tried different Proton versions even. A couple of questions that will not make much sense, but at this point is the “gut feeling” and “experience” on solving weird tech problems:

  • Have you tried with Steam Flatpak instead of the one installed on the system? I sincerely don’t think this is the issue at all but it seems to be one of those cases where something is doing something for something and it’s causing something XD but it looks/feels like black magic.
  • Have you checked “power” options? Did anything change. Have you checked the BIOS? This is literally nonsense, as updating the OS/reinstalling another distro has nothing to do with BIOS options changing… but… :man_shrugging: just to be sure and on the safe side that none of that stuff is causing problems.
  • How about any service to the machine? Is it dirty/clogged, is it new enough that doesn’t need any repaste?
  • What DE are you using? Have you tried getting into an X11 session instead of wayland? (this might be more advanced if you don’t have X11 installed and I also am not sure if this would solve anything but who knows.

Also do you notice a performance issue in all or majority of games? Or just select ones (like the ones you mentioned) but 90% of other games you play are fine?
I ask because if it’s majority of games, then there’s something definitely going on with your system (software or hardware), but if it’s only select games then it could be something software related and how it “works” on the hardware you have.

As previously mentioned, that iGPU isn’t a gaming one by any means, however, would you kindly share your machine specs?
If it has 4 or 8GBs of RAM and you haven’t set up any swap space, for example, it could lead to other issues like crashing, stuttering and such. I have experienced similar problems for different reasons on my desktop PC. Things like playing Cities Skylines 2. Or now Incursion Red River (unreal engine) sometimes it just crashes and dies and I am not sure if it’s because I “only have” 16GBs of RAM. Need for Speed Underground 2 also crashes from time to time but I think it has to do with the autosave thing.

Not all games do, however. Baldur’s Gate 3 works wonderfully, for example.

24

That is definitely a frustrating situation, especially when you’ve got the hardware but the software isn’t playing ball. Since you’re on Intel, it might be worth double-checking if you have the vulkan-intel and lib32-vulkan-intel packages installed and updated. Sometimes the system defaults to a generic driver or an older version of the Vulkan loader, which can absolutely tank your frame rates. Also, if you’re using a laptop with hybrid graphics, make sure the game is actually being forced to run on the dedicated GPU rather than the integrated one. A quick way to test is using the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable in your launch options.