Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Zenless Zone Zero
• Steam AppID of the game: /

System Information

• GPU: AMD Radeon 780M (integrated)
• Video driver version: Mesa 26.2.2-arch3.2
• Kernel version: 7.2.3-1-cachyos
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/xh3sh/aec3f8308be2117e97570a2b541c4474

steam-zzz-log.zip

• Proton version: Tried both Proton-GE and proton-cachyos-11.0-20260703 (Steam Linux Runtime), same result on both

I confirm:

• [ ] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

(Note: I am aware of #8951, which reports abnormally high CPU usage on this game under Wine. Opening a separate report because the symptom here is different and more specific - a hard FPS ceiling with GPU headroom unused, on integrated rather than discrete GPU - but flagging the overlap in case a maintainer wants to merge them.)

Symptoms

FPS sits flat around 50, regardless of:

• graphics quality settings (Low through High, all tested)
• native vs non-native resolution
• in-game frame limiter (set to 60, no vsync)
• DXVK_FRAME_RATE=0
• wrapping the launch in gamescope
• which Proton build is used (see above)

At native resolution (1920x1200 @ 60Hz), GPU clock does ramp up (observed up to ~2673MHz on pp_dpm_sclk) and GPU load sits around 73% - so it's not simply idling at a low power state. FPS stays at ~50 regardless.

Ruled out via direct testing (no effect on FPS):

• ACPI platform_profile (balanced vs performance)
• power-profiles-daemon / cpufreq EPP (balance_performance vs performance)
• GameMode (confirmed active via LD_PRELOAD)
• lactd stopped (to rule out it fighting for SMU control)
• multiple kernels
• gamescope
• different Proton builds (GE-Proton and proton-cachyos)

Control test: forced Unigine Heaven (owned via Steam) to run through the same Proton-GE instead of its native Linux build, DirectX11 render mode, same native resolution. Result: FPS ranges naturally with scene load - average 63.4, min 8.7, max 118.3 - with GPU clock reaching the full ~2700MHz under heavier load. So Proton-GE + DXVK + amdgpu on this specific APU scale normally under real GPU load; the flat ~50 ceiling seems specific to this game.

Hypothesis & profiling data:
- top -H shows the game's main thread is pegged at ~95–98% CPU of a single core, while worker threads hover
around 10–15%.
- perf stat on the main thread shows an IPC of ~0.64 with ~21% stalled-cycles-frontend and ~28% cache-miss rate,
consistent with instruction-fetch latency on the large 522MB GameAssembly.dll (IL2CPP) under Wine translation.
- Increasing CPU core clock from 3.3 GHz to 4.5 GHz via platform profile does not change FPS, confirming the
bottleneck is memory-latency/translation bound rather than raw compute or GPU.

Reproduction

1. Launch Zenless Zone Zero via Proton (GE-Proton or proton-cachyos), any launch options.
2. Enter the open world or combat, stand still or move freely.
3. Observe FPS via MangoHud or DXVK_HUD=fps,frametimes,gpuload - it sits at ~50 regardless of scene complexity, movement, or any settings change above.
4. For comparison, run Unigine Heaven through the same Proton build in DirectX11 mode - FPS scales normally with scene load instead of sitting flat.