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THE STEAM LAG TIMEBOMB ON LINUX... my solution

steamclosed
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11673 · opened 2025-01-19 by Fe316 · updated 2025-01-19 · 3 comments · github
FFe316 2025-01-19 github

THE STEAM LAG TIMEBOMB... my solution :

Unfortunately, as of today, January 2025, the issue known as the "lag timebomb" still persists on Steam for Linux. This problem causes lag and significant FPS drops due to frequent frametime spikes when moving the mouse after a certain amount of gameplay.

In my case, exactly 40 minutes into a game, I have to exit and restart it. Something conflicts with Steam... but what?!

I searched extensively for a solution and often found the suggestion of setting LD_PRELOAD="" as a launch option for the game as a "workaround."
In my case, it didn't work. I was going crazy... I tried different kernels, switched drivers, tried various Proton versions... I even reinstalled the operating system with multiple tweaks, but nothing worked!

After running countless tests without finding a solution, I decided to focus on the CPU's "power governor."

I use Arch Linux with KDE Plasma, so the power governor that integrates well with KDE is power-profiles-daemon. And, as it turns out, that's the issue in my case!!!

By setting it to performance mode, I checked the CPU's behavior using the command:
watch -n 1 "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz"

In reality, it wasn’t doing what it claimed to do—even in performance mode, the frequency was fluctuating dynamically between maximum and minimum values.

I uninstalled it and installed the linux-tools package, which includes the cpupower governor.
Before launching the game, I run the following commands:

# Set the CPU governor to performance
sudo cpupower frequency-set --governor performance
# Set the minimum and maximum frequency to 3.60 GHz (the maximum for my CPU)
sudo cpupower frequency-set --min 3.60GHz --max 3.60GHz

SURPRISE!!!
The "lag timebomb" was defused, and now I no longer have this problem!

Since Valve hasn’t offered a concrete solution to this issue for years, I hope they’ll pay me a lot of money for solving it. :)
Just kidding... or maybe not... XD

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: 6.6.72-1-lts
DE: Plasma 6.2.5
WM: KWin
CPU: Intel i5-6500 (4) @ 3.600GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Memory: 16 GB

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2025-01-19 github

Hello @Fe316, this issue is already being tracked at #11446. Closing as a duplicate.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2025-01-19 github

On a second read of this, my initial read of this was incorrect, but at the same time, cpu frequency management is outside of Steam's control and that's something you should discuss with your distro. Besides the direct parallel of symptoms, you've described your CPU getting close to overheating and the thermal daemon being sluggish to throttle back before it's been forced to take severe measures to keep the CPU's temperature under control. (Similar to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/141#issuecomment-1016483190)

FFe316 2025-01-19 github

In the tests I conducted in-game, I did not detect any overheating issues, neither with the CPU nor the GPU. The CPU consistently operates below 50°C.

The real issue I identified in my case is the power governor power-profiles-daemon, which is typically installed with KDE Plasma. I uninstalled it and replaced it with linux-tools, which, as mentioned above, includes cpupower for CPU power management.

There are no overheating issues. The power-profiles-daemon was not functioning as configured and was likely causing the malfunctions in games, although I don't know the exact reason. This issue with the power governor is a bug that I will also report to the Arch community.

Nothing extracted yet.