Post install optimizations and questions.
Hi! I hope you all are having a great day. I just installed Bazzite on my laptop and would like some help regarding a couple of issues.
1) Gaming performance is unfortunately very choppy, I am using the latest proton experimental offered by steam and have tested it with Deep Rock Galactic and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. Both games are easy to run on Windows but on Bazzite I'm getting sub 20 FPS. Is there anything I might have missed? I haven't made any 'gaming related' tweaks post install. I also get black bars whenever I downsize the resolution in game. The laptop in question has a 13" screen and in my case changing the resolution to something like 1366x768 instead of 1920x1080 gives me immense boost in performance at the cost of a minimal downgrade in visual quality.
2) Some applications are not scaling well, particularly the UI for Steam and Spotify looks way too tiny. I did a bit of Googling and saw people suggesting to add some environment variables, I tried doing that but it made things way too gigantic (tried a scale of 1.5) so I didn't bother with it anymore. Though I'd love to know if there's a more effective way to accomplish this.
3) Is there a 'power management' utility built into Bazzite? Preferably something which can cap my laptop's battery to 60% or 80%, yes my laptop supports the feature. Prior to Bazzite, I was accustomed to using TLP (paired with TLP-UI) for this, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be working now. I am aware that KDE also has this built in but due to a bug with ASUS' laptops, that also doesn't work. The charging thresholds reset after a reboot. I've seen people brute forcing this with a script which resets battery thresholds at each boot but I wanted some advise before I do something which breaks my install.
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Since I don't have Discord Nitro, I had to break my message into two parts.
4) Is there a helpful guide to get Bottles to work? I'm not expecting every windows application to work OOTB, but I tried it with Cyberduck (it lets you browse cloud drives and is especially useful for people with Cryptomator cloud vaults) which did install but it refuses to launch.
5) I went through the Bazzite wiki, and it says to avoid installing packages with rpm-ostree because they may break the install. Is it fine if I have some packages installed through it? Things like r-clone and TLP were only possible to install like that.
For more context here are the laptop specs, it's an ASUS ZenBook 13 UM325UA with a Ryzen 7 5700U APU and 16 gigabytes of RAM. I installed the ASUS version of the ISO.
1. This requires more information about your GPU to give a better answer. I see the info at the end now.
2-3. Pass
4. Non-game apps can be hit or miss depending on how much they rely on Windows calls. You can check out WineHQ to see if someone else attempted it for this specific app.
5. It's fine for some, but it is better to leave this to flatpaks or distrobox containers
Thanks! I'm hoping more people can chime in later. I'd love to switch to Linux permanently but the occasional games I play keep me stuck to Windows.
You can use kde advanced power management to cap the battery or your BIOS
4) We don't use or recommend bottles, so I can't give you any input on that. Lutris is pre-installed
5) I would try distro box before you attempt to layer packages, rclone will definitely work in distrobox
The order of operation is flatpack, brew, distrobox, and then layer
3) The only battery management utility bundled is HHD, and that's only for handhelds. Every piece of hardware has a different method of doing this so it's not possible for us to just bundle a solution
2) Your scaling issues with steam is a bug where steam does not honor the global scaling value, a launch option is the best way to resolve that
1) There are no tweaks you have to do to get good gaming performance out of the box, it should just be working
You'll need to provide more info for us to figure out what's up with your performance
You'll need to provide more info for us to figure out what's up with your performanceAlrighty, what more information can I provide?
You can use a tool like MangoHUD to show your CPU and GPU usage during game play so we can see where the bottleneck is.
I'll test it with a few games and share the feedback. I have DRG installed and after an update it re-compiled the vulkan shaders - not sure if that helped but the game does seem to be running a lot more smoother
let Steam precompile or download precompiled shaders and see if that helps across the board
your APU is probably not strong enough to have a seamless on-the-fly shader generation
Yeah actually... the two games I tested are working fine now? Don't ask me how but they're just a lot more smoother. On my first try there were noticeable FPS drops and input delays but at the moment they're working fine. I'm still getting black borders when I downsize the resolution in Ace Combat but since that is not the case with DRG - I think its safe to say that its an issue limited to that specific game. I'm also getting stable 30+ fps according to Mango HUD which is probably what I was getting on Windows and is honestly what this APU is capable of.
I'm downloading a few more games, if things work as expected, I think we can close this thread, thanks!
probably they are compiling shader at first so you get some perf hit, usually after one session or two it will go away
gotcha, that's nice to hear
Tried some more games, yup they're running fine. I guess it really was an issue with shader compilation. Gaming was my biggest concern and that seems to be resolved now. I'll see what I can do about limiting the charge thresholds.
Just one more question, what do you use to record your gameplay? My APU never supported ReLive on Windows (afaik) and I was relying on the Xbox game bar to record stuff. Should I use OBS with replay buffer enabled or is there a better application for this?
i think obs is the most popular
I see, thanks
I use Steam to record now
the steam beta recording is working now? iirc it was kinda borked when they announced it
it works with Steam games for me. I have it set to 4 hours of recordings