Summary:
Reproducible, perfectly periodic stall where the GPU alternates between ~97-98% and ~17-25% utilization on a strict ~7-9 second cycle, across multiple unrelated game engines, with no Xid error, no crash, no driver recovery — this appears distinct from the Xid 109 CTX SWITCH TIMEOUT crash reports (#1080, #1097, ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux#3290) and the general desktop stutter in #777.
System:
- Bazzite (Fedora Kinoite-based), KDE Plasma 6, Wayland
- CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
- GPU: RTX 5080 (GB203), 16GB VRAM
- Driver: nvidia-open, tested 610.43.02 and 595.71.05 (both from the
experimental-bleeding-edge branch per in-game diagnostics — no mature/stable branch currently exists for this GPU)
- Display: 5120x2160, tested at 120Hz+VRR and fixed 60Hz/no-VRR — no effect on the pattern
Reproduction matrix (all at max settings, 5120x2160):
| Title |
Engine |
Renderer path |
Result |
| The Last of Us Part I |
Naughty Dog proprietary |
DX12 via Proton/VKD3D-Proton |
Periodic stall (FPS ~120↔17) |
| RoboCop: Rogue City |
Unreal Engine 5 |
DX12 via Proton/VKD3D-Proton |
Periodic stall |
| Counter-Strike 2 |
Source 2 |
Native Vulkan, no Proton |
Periodic stall (FPS ~60-100↔15) |
| Team Fortress 2 |
Source 1 |
Native OpenGL/Vulkan, no Proton |
Clean, no oscillation |
Proton is therefore not a required factor (CS2 reproduces natively) — the discriminator looks more like renderer complexity (multi-queue/async-compute usage), present in the three affected titles and absent in TF2's simpler forward renderer.
Key measurement: during the low-utilization phase, GPU clocks/power state do NOT drop (stays P0, ~2780-2820MHz, no HW/SW slowdown flag) — the GPU has full clock/power headroom throughout, it simply isn't being handed work. This also reproduces identically in a completely static scene (game's own pause menu / title screen with no simulation running), ruling out scene-content-driven load variance.
Ruled out: VRAM (never saturated), system RAM/swap, disk I/O (PSI = 0), HDR, native-Wayland vs Xwayland, CPU P-core/E-core pinning (all threads pinned to P-cores via taskset — no change), network/telemetry latency, other GPU clients (nvidia-smi pmon confirms only the game process has load), VRR/refresh-rate/fps-cap combinations, Proton version (Hotfix vs 10.0 — the latter caused an unrelated single Xid 109 hang on savegame load, not the periodic pattern), driver version (610.43.02 vs 595.71.05, same branch).
Happy to provide nvidia-bug-report.sh output, raw nvidia-smi CSV logs, or test further permutations if useful.
Summary:
Reproducible, perfectly periodic stall where the GPU alternates between ~97-98% and ~17-25% utilization on a strict ~7-9 second cycle, across multiple unrelated game engines, with no Xid error, no crash, no driver recovery — this appears distinct from the Xid 109 CTX SWITCH TIMEOUT crash reports (#1080, #1097, ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux#3290) and the general desktop stutter in #777.
System:
experimental-bleeding-edgebranch per in-game diagnostics — no mature/stable branch currently exists for this GPU)Reproduction matrix (all at max settings, 5120x2160):
Proton is therefore not a required factor (CS2 reproduces natively) — the discriminator looks more like renderer complexity (multi-queue/async-compute usage), present in the three affected titles and absent in TF2's simpler forward renderer.
Key measurement: during the low-utilization phase, GPU clocks/power state do NOT drop (stays P0, ~2780-2820MHz, no HW/SW slowdown flag) — the GPU has full clock/power headroom throughout, it simply isn't being handed work. This also reproduces identically in a completely static scene (game's own pause menu / title screen with no simulation running), ruling out scene-content-driven load variance.
Ruled out: VRAM (never saturated), system RAM/swap, disk I/O (PSI = 0), HDR, native-Wayland vs Xwayland, CPU P-core/E-core pinning (all threads pinned to P-cores via taskset — no change), network/telemetry latency, other GPU clients (
nvidia-smi pmonconfirms only the game process has load), VRR/refresh-rate/fps-cap combinations, Proton version (Hotfix vs 10.0 — the latter caused an unrelated single Xid 109 hang on savegame load, not the periodic pattern), driver version (610.43.02 vs 595.71.05, same branch).Happy to provide nvidia-bug-report.sh output, raw nvidia-smi CSV logs, or test further permutations if useful.