Is there a way for me to diagnose at which point specifically the freeze happens? Some debug logging or so?

After updating the NVidia driver to 4.6.0 NVIDIA 550.120, Subnautica worked fine on one test, then froze again on another test.
BeamNG.drive gets further and I am able to actually start the game, but before everything renders, it frezes again.

Edit: Quick edit to mention that I was playing Palworld. This also happened to my on TCG Card shop simulator. So it's not just happening on one game.

I experience the same bug, however I've found that alt-tabing out will run the game in the background, and alt-tabing back will freeze the game again.

I believe proton has a bug where whatever variable they use to track if the game is the active window is accidentally reversed somehow during gameplay.

Here's my own system specs.

Computer Information:
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
Model: MS-1584
Form Factor: Laptop
No Touch Input Detected
Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: GenuineIntel
CPU Brand: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12650H
CPU Family: 0x6
CPU Model: 0x9a
CPU Stepping: 0x3
CPU Type: 0x0
Speed: 4600 MHz
16 logical processors
10 physical processors
Hyper-threading: Supported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Unsupported
SSE41: Supported
SSE42: Supported
AES: Supported
AVX: Supported
AVX2: Supported
AVX512F: Unsupported
AVX512PF: Unsupported
AVX512ER: Unsupported
AVX512CD: Unsupported
AVX512VNNI: Unsupported
SHA: Supported
CMPXCHG16B: Supported
LAHF/SAHF: Supported
PrefetchW: Unsupported
BMI1: Supported
BMI2: Supported
F16C: Supported
FMA: Supported
Operating System Version:
"Arch Linux" (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 6.12.4-arch1-1
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 12101015
X Window Manager: Mutter (Muffin)
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime_0.20241024.105847
Client Information:
Version: 1733265492
Browser GPU Acceleration Status: Enabled
Browser Canvas: Enabled
Browser Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Enabled
Browser Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
Browser Compositing: Enabled
Browser Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Browser OpenGL: Enabled
Browser Rasterization: Enabled
Browser Raw Draw: Disabled
Browser Skia Graphite: Disabled
Browser Video Decode: Enabled
Browser Video Encode: Disabled
Browser Vulkan: Disabled
Browser WebGL: Enabled
Browser WebGL2: Enabled
Browser WebGPU: Disabled
Browser WebNN: Disabled
Video Card:
Driver: Intel Mesa Intel(R) Graphics (ADL GT2)
Driver Version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.3.1-arch1.3
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 144 Hz
VendorID: 0x8086
DeviceID: 0x46a3
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 13.54" x 7.60" (15.51" diag), 34.4cm x 19.3cm (39.4cm diag)
Primary VRAM Not Detected
Sound card:
Audio device: Realtek ALC256
Memory:
RAM: 15691 Mb
VR Hardware:
VR Headset: None detected
Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 487873 MB
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 143319 MB
Storage:
Number of SSDs: 1
SSD sizes: 0B
Number of HDDs: 0
Number of removable drives: 0

Let me just point out that in my case Alt+Tab won't work, neither will Ctrl+Alt+F* to switch virtual terminal - the machine is completely frozen.

Experiencing same issue with most resource-intensive games.

To save you a tldr if you're looking for solution - I have none, I just tried a lot of things that I documented below.

I've managed to get the system into "frozen-but-not-quite-frozen" state by re-niceing the process to 19 and then running until it froze (Cyberpunk 2077, btw).
When it froze, it took over 29 cores (out of 32) and pushed them to 100%, leaving 3 of them running so I was able to open the console and investigate a bit.

Turns out, process is stuck inside kernel, on a syscall: kill -9 does nothing. It would execute and return the prompt but after checking the top and htop, process was still there. After a bit of research, turns out that kill -9 will always kill the process, just not right away if you don't own the process or, as said, process is stuck on a syscall. I tried to sudo the kill - which blocked the terminal (it allowed me to open the second one).
I tried systemctl reboot, which also got stuck doing nothing, still allowing me to open another terminal.

Finally, a suspicion arose when I tried to run btop, which is patched to also show GPU data - it drew the frames, but not any of the stats. Since top and htop ran, I started to wonder whether the error had to do with the GPU. I also noticed that anything involving network (eg. discord) was stuck on no connection, and I think btop simply queries /dev or /sys or /proc for information, so I am pretty sure the syscall has to do with filesystem IO.

I've tried sudo strace but that got stuck doing nothing.
Attaching the gdb also got stuck doing nothing.
Switching to a different TTY also doesn't work - I haven't tried it this time around because I know it freezes my machine up for good.

Finally - no sysrq give any response - except reboot.

I've checked /proc/<pid>/fd,it had about 40 files opened, but I don't know how to investigate this more closely so I didn't at the time.

Other things I tried to get some more info:

1. previous Proton versions - 7.06, 8.05, 9.04, and also 6.21-GE, all exhibiting same behaviour.
2. Since I'm running Arch, I've also tried running steam-native rather than steam-runtime (forcing it to use my system libraries) - same behaviour.
3. I tested Steam Beta client, and I tested disabling HW acceleration in Steam Client and closing every other piece of software which may need GPU accel. Same behaviour.
4. Tried PROTON_NO_ESYNC and PROTON_NO_FSYNC flags (might not have anything to do with it, but quickly reading this mentions eventfd and file IO right there in the first paragraph)
5. Finally, I tested freshest kernel my distro gives me (6.12) and LTS (6.6). Same behaviour.

What I personally find curious, is that I expected to tie the malfunction to a standard game engine (ie. "All UE games" or "All Unity games"), but turns out that a homebrewed beast such as REDEngine causes the same issue. I've tested some heavier Unity titles and some UE titles - and they all do this, so... yeah... tldr - I got no clue what is going on.

P.S. @SeemsToHaveLotsOfProblems Hey, do you legit run your games on Intel GPU, or you're using Primus or something to offload to Nvidia? I'm asking because I studied both of your hardware specs and I thought I can write it off to nvidia driver issue (since both me and @martinvlk use nvidia), but if you're using Intel/Mesa - then that's yet another dead end.

Computer Information:
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Model: ROG STRIX Z790-E GAMING WIFI
Form Factor: Desktop
No Touch Input Detected
Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: GenuineIntel
CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900K
CPU Family: 0x6
CPU Model: 0xb7
CPU Stepping: 0x1
CPU Type: 0x0
Speed: 5700 MHz
32 logical processors
24 physical processors
Hyper-threading: Supported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Unsupported
SSE41: Supported
SSE42: Supported
AES: Supported
AVX: Supported
AVX2: Supported
AVX512F: Unsupported
AVX512PF: Unsupported
AVX512ER: Unsupported
AVX512CD: Unsupported
AVX512VNNI: Unsupported
SHA: Supported
CMPXCHG16B: Supported
LAHF/SAHF: Supported
PrefetchW: Unsupported
BMI1: Supported
BMI2: Supported
F16C: Supported
FMA: Supported
Operating System Version:
"Arch Linux" (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 6.6.68-1-lts
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 12101015
X Window Manager: LG3D   (this is a lie told by  my WM to fool some other apps, its actually XMonad)
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime_0.20241024.105847
Client Information:
Version: 1733265492
Browser GPU Acceleration Status: Disabled
Browser Canvas: Unavailable
Browser Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Disabled
Browser Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
Browser Compositing: Disabled
Browser Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Browser OpenGL: Disabled
Browser Rasterization: Disabled
Browser Raw Draw: Disabled
Browser Skia Graphite: Disabled
Browser Video Decode: Disabled
Browser Video Encode: Disabled
Browser Vulkan: Disabled
Browser WebGL: Unavailable
Browser WebGL2: Unavailable
Browser WebGPU: Disabled
Browser WebNN: Disabled
Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070/PCIe/SSE2
Driver Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 565.77
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
VendorID: 0x10de
DeviceID: 0x2786
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 2
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 3840 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 23.54" x 13.23" (26.97" diag), 59.8cm x 33.6cm (68.5cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 12282 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x 16x
Sound card:
Audio device: %1$s
Memory:
RAM: 64038 Mb
VR Hardware:
VR Headset: None detected  (that's wrong, I got Valve Index connected, just powered off)
Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 704454 MB
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 111921 MB
Storage:
Number of SSDs: 3
SSD sizes: 1024G,0B,0B
Number of HDDs: 0
Number of removable drives: 0