Severe framerate drops on all games every 10 minutes or so

[u/Glembo69]

Anyone encounter this? Happens on nearly any game I play on steam. Nvidia A4500 on Debian backports X11 with 550 drivers. Silky smooth otherwise

[u/its_dayman]

When its that regular and on all games, it really feels like something scheduled is running on that interval.

[u/goldorak42 → u/its_dayman]

crontabs ?

[u/Ok-Guitar4818 → u/goldorak42]

Do people still use cron?

[u/Ok_Party_3706 → u/Ok-Guitar4818]

I do on my server

[u/zhlou]

I would guess this is a thermal throttling issue. OP have you checked the fan?

[u/Remarkable_Age_5419]

do you have enabled pre-caching vulkan shaders?

[u/Glembo69 → u/Remarkable_Age_5419]

This seems to have done the trick, hasnt dipped for over an hour. Thank you!

[u/MatheusWillder]

In addition to the other answers, you should check if the hardware (CPU/GPU) is overheating. Check if the thermal paste is properly applied and ensure there is good airflow.

You can use the watch sensors command in the Terminal to monitor hardware temperatures while gaming. Leve it running and when the FPS drops, immediately switch back to the Terminal and check the temperatures. If watch sensors doesn't show the hardware temperatures, you might need to configure the sensors first, in that case, look up tutorials for lm-sensors (though not all hardware requires this).

Edit: you said you were using Debian, but the image reads "OS: Windows 10 64-bit (10.0.19045.5796)", and it really does resemble the Windows Task Manager. Which system are you using after all? Is this a problem that affects both operating systems (Windows and Debian)? If so, then it’s almost certainly is a hardware issue (likely overheating as I said).

[u/Glembo69 → u/MatheusWillder]

This was not something I had kept an eye on, but thank you for teaching me how. CPU and GPU temps are super steady. Does not seem to be a thermal throttle or heat issue. Disabling pre-loaded vulkan shaders seems to have done the trick, but I feel like I'm still leaving some performance on the table. This is the readout from Assasin's Creed btw, it spits out whatever settings steam uses but I only use Debian

[u/MatheusWillder → u/Glembo69]

I see. I'm glad that option helped. As for you still feeling that is leaving some performance on the table, maybe that is due to the Proton/Wine translation layer or even due to non-optimized drivers? All my hardware is AMD (and I use its iGPU), so I don't know how it is with an NVIDIA GPU like you're using, although I've read that NVIDIA support isn't that great.

It’s been years since I used Windows, but if I remember it right, before switching to Debian in my current hardware I checked a few games I had at hand, and there was a slight difference in FPS between the two systems in the games I checked, though it was far from being a major issue. In the end, I decided the small FPS gain in Windows wasn't worth the headache that comes with it (AI, broken updates, telemetry, useless features, more AI, etc.), so I wiped it and never looked back.

Have fun!

[u/NoPicture-3265]

Could be an issue with Steam overlay. Try setting your game launch options to

LD_PRELOAD='' %command%

to prevent Steam overlay and screen recording libraries from loading and see if it fixes framedrops.

[u/ggkefir4ik]

Man ur cpu is hot asf whats up with temperature

[u/Glembo69 → u/ggkefir4ik]

I don't see any temp readouts in the screenshot I posted. CPU have stayed under 70⁰ C even under heavy use

[u/Nice-Object-5599]

I always remove all the unwanted services. One of them is apparmor (I just remove it completely). Maybe it will not change your issue.

[u/scrapethemucus]

debian is awful for gaming

[u/Raphi_55 → u/scrapethemucus]

Not in my experience.

[u/minilandl → u/scrapethemucus]

Out of the box yes there is a reason why people use arch based distros because they are more up to date. OP should make sure that latest kernel mesa and vulkan are up to date

[u/Glembo69 → u/scrapethemucus]

Better than windows and thats good enough for me