Fedora workstation 42. Steam flatpak. Same behavior no matter which proton I use. 4090 using the rpm fusion teamās package
Behavior: I boot up. I fire off a game from steam flatpak. Game 100% worked fine yesterday. Today something updated, so I get āprocessing vulkan shadersā let it finish. Game starts - slow af. Game works, but itās like the video card isnāt there, and the game is using my CPUās integrated GPU (I literally think this is whatās happening). The settings are way too high so itās a lag fest - if I turn them way down, everything is fine (at 320x200 LOL)
Ok so hereās the fix. I update the system. Thatās it. Update, reboot, everything works perfectly. (Interestingly, vulkan shaders need to be processed again). My question is WHY? Shouldnāt I be able to not update and things still work? Iām not talking like I havenāt updated in years. Sometimes it happens within days. Itās not the end of the world - I was going to update anyways - but itās annoying.
Any thoughts on what to check and maybe tweak? Thanks.
Sounds like youād updated your system GPU drivers but not your flatpak ones. Itās an oddity and Iām not sure what the fix is apart from knowing you always need to update flatpak when you pull in a driver update.
I agree thatās what it sounds like. Except I havenāt updated anything - or if something did update - it happened on its own.
On most distros, Flatpak has a separate auto-update process that runs independent of system upgrades. Disabling that āfeatureā should solve the problems youāre seeing.
Ok this is interesting. I wasnāt aware flatpaks could update on their own. I thought it was either āflatpak updateā OR the package manager gui helper kicked off flatpak updates. Iāll have to dig into this on fedora. Iāve been running arch/endeavor for so long, it never occurred to me fedora may be auto updating flatpaks.
Yeah, definitely do this. Getting half a system update can cause all kinds of weird problems.
It can also be that NVIDIA cards have issue with different power states. My card will forget that it is connected to HDMI if it is idle for too long. Itās entirely possible that the card just hibernated and the flatpak container removed it and failed to re-add it leading to CPU rendering, a reboot will fix this (which OP did as part of a system update).
You could fix it without a reboot, but that would require you digging into the problem a bit more. In my case, I wrote a script that re-set the display properties and that caused the DE to attempt to use the card again. I have it bound to a hotkey so if my display doesnāt turn on, I can just press a button (instead of rebooting).
Sounds like your GPU isnāt being engaged. What does
nvidia-smishow?I agree. Iāll check and report back tonight once I get home from work. It happens often enough, I might even be able to catch it in the act.
Due to the way Flatpak deals with nvidia drivers, you need to run flatpak update after any time the nvidia drivers update and you reboot the system. Thankfully you do not need to reboot after updating only flatpaks. Could not find a good source for this now, unfortunately.
As for the āwhy?ā - flatpak apps do not contain the userspace parts of the nvidia driver required to use the GPU properly, they come packaged as separate runtimes. These nvidia driver runtimes need to match the specific driver version you are currently running. If they donāt match, flatpak downloads the right runtimes when updating.
I have had weird issues ever since upgrading in place from Fedora 41 to 42 also, but I have an AMD card. For example digikam suddenly stopped working unless I run it as flatpak or I force it to use the igpu. Smb4k stopped auto mounting and I sometimes have to try it a couple of times before it works. Random UI stuff would glitch and then be fixed in an update. Just odd stuff like that. I should reinstall fresh, but I donāt want the hassle right now. My games and other apps work fine.
My only suggestion is to try forcing it to use the main GPU with an environment variable like DRI_PRIME. I donāt know what it is for Nvidia though.