Long Stutters/Freezing When Playing Games

Specs:

Operating System: Bazzite 44
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.28.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.5-ogc5.1.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (610.43.03)
Graphics Processor 2: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor
Manufacturer: ASUS

Issue: Random long stutters / freezes (about 3-5 seconds) during gameplay. The game gets unfrozen when “Alt + Tab”, The Super Key, or “Print Screen” are pressed.

I’ve been looking everywhere for weeks now and I have found no one else with this issue. While I’m not 100% certain at this point it’s specifically a Wayland/KDE issue, I have to cover my bases. Since I got this PC a few weeks ago, every game I have played (that being Spiderman Remastered, Black Ops 3, and The Finals) have all had these long frame drops. They seem to happen randomly in all of the games, with there being some sessions where it won’t happen at all. However, I was able to get Black Ops 3 working after I set the environmental variable KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1 and switching it over to Gamescope. When I had Direct Scanout enabled, Black Ops 3 and Spiderman Remastered would freeze indefinitely until I pressed one of the above keys.

With The Finals and Spiderman Remastered, I noticed the problem was gone after enabling DLSS Frame Generation and DLSS Super Resolution, but that caused both games to have severe performance problems. Since turning that off, the frame drops that plagued Black Ops 3 made it’s way over to both titles and now they happen randomly. One thing that I did notice about these freezes were that the game would become unfrozen after I interacted with one of the keys mentioned above. I’d also like to add the fact that my monitor does not support VRR/G-sync, which I know is a known bug with NVIDIA drivers right now.

I’ve done my due diligence and checked journalctl and have found no error messages during these freezes. I’ve tried numerous Proton versions to see if there was a difference and I couldn’t find any. My CPU and GPU aren’t throttled nor are they overheating.

Hopefully I’ve explained the situation well enough. It’s extremely frustrating not having the ability to recreate or pinpoint why these are happening in the first place.

Update: I found a thread on Github and NVIDIA. Judging by the lack of activity from NVIDIA devs and people in general as of late, I doubt a fix will be issued anytime soon. If anyone has any useful information regarding this problem, feel free to let me know.

Final Update: I decided to bite the bullet and switch to an AMD GPU, something I should’ve done in the first place. None of the developers have interacted with this bug in months and there’s no clear workaround for it out there. I highly recommend anyone looking to game on Linux (especially on Wayland) to completely avoid the Blackwell series cards until they can get better support.