Hello 🫡

Chanced on this fine forum by way of this thread. Figured a message in a bottle could not hurt.

This might meander a bit so the Trigger first:

• 1. Sank a hundred hours into Hades Ⅱ over the past few months; by most accounts Proton does a great job with that game; indeed, I don't remember tweaking anything to get it working.


• 2. System SSD died. RIP 🪦


• 3. Waited a week for the replacement to arrive.


• 4. Re-installed the system.


• 5. Now I am getting a consistent, uncannily reproducible stuttering running around in the game's main hub areas.

(To be more precise: while running around the edges of these areas, things feel smooth, and Steam's FPS counter reports a steady 60. Closing in on the center of these areas, which I guess is a bit more SFX/particle-heavy: chopping begins; FPS counter drops to 40±10; FWIW it feels like choppiness is only visible when running around, the idle animations look smooth to me despite the counter not climbing back up)

I open with this because, during all the investigations I'm about to describe, one maddening thought I can't shake is "but it was buttery smooth last week despite never ever needing to fiddle with [THING]".

With that out of the way, complementing the PC info from my profile:

• This is openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling release; Packman third-party repo enabled), Linux 6.11, Plasma on Wayland.
  
  • Sanity-checked X11: symptoms persist.


• GPU is my CPU's (AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G) integrated unit.


• Not forcing any "compatibility tool" version, so IIUC using "Proton Experimental".
  
  • Sanity-checked a couple old versions since some users mention this helping on ProtonDB: symptoms persist.


• Sanity-checked lowering in-game settings ("Low" graphics; lowered resolution; switched to windowed; disabled VSync): symptoms persist.


• Reducing perf noise by disabling the file indexer (balooctl6 suspend) and disabling swap (swapoff -a; even at "High" graphics setting memory is nowhere near exhausted).

("Sanity-checked [CHANGE]" meaning that, once [CHANGE] was shown to have no impact, it was reverted & is no longer part of the baseline)

Went down a couple rabbit holes; for the record:

• Deepest one was figuring why the "Power Management" systray widget was missing the "Power Save - Balanced - Performance" slider; some bugtracker and wiki crawls later, found the UEFI box to tick to enable amd_pstate and make powerprofilesctl happy 🥳 alas, no even with "Performance", symptoms persist. Which makes some sense: 90% sure I never looked into this on the previous installation.


• Installed gamemode; ran the self-tests; stuck it in the Launch Options: symptoms persist.

The topic I linked above seems to offer a new rabbit hole to dig into. Given the lack of results from my previous attempts though, I feel like it's the right moment to pause, gather the evidence, and submit it to the jury for consideration before I tamper with the scene some more.

Apologies for the wall of text. Refrained from shoveling scrollfuls of logs and CLI output because I have no clue which would be useful (per the "but it was fine last week" principle, and per the complete and utter lack of tangible effect on the symptoms from all my remediation attempts); happy to deliver on demand though.

FWIW, watching radeontop & amdgpu_top while the game is running, I do see that "frames ↘" correlates with "graph bars ↗", and the bars do seem pretty full. Not sure what to conclude though. Maybe those 100 hours were all just a dream and it always lagged? I'm sure a bona fide GPU would fare better; maybe it'll have to come to that? I'll be sad to lay off the iGPU though; the little guy has been working hard and pulled off some impressive stunts.

No idea if this is a good OP; again, apologies if that logorrhea isn't ideal by this forum's standard. Cheers 🙏