For the past week or so, it has been near impossible to play the following Steam games: Stalker 2 (UE5), Misery (UE5), Satisfactory (UE5), House Flipper (Unity!). At some point within 20 minutes of playing, opening a menu, map, inventory, or pause screen, etc. will freeze and crash the game. There is no bug report afterword, just a crash to desktop. I have many hours in all of those games, and never had a problem like this before. I play satisfactory and/or stalker daily. I thought it was a UE5 thing but maybe it is a DX12 thing? 2D games work fine. I have tried various proton versions through steam to no avail.
Operating System: Bazzite 43 Desktop
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.17.7-ba19.fc43.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.2 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
Could it be oom-killer? If your system runs out of ram it will inexplicably kill the largest user of ram, like your game.
Running
dmesgin terminal right after a crash could tell you.I’ve seen odd behaviour occasionally on proton. I would usually set the proton version manually starting with experimental and working backwards until I get a version that works
Have you tried switching to an older proton version? That fixed it for me (different game, same issue)
I’m fairly new to Linux / Bazzite so I have limited advice, but if it used to work you could try rolling back to a prior version and see if that helps. Bit of a band aid solution but you will know if an update to Bazzite caused the issues or not.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Updates_Rollbacks_and_Rebasing/
worth a shot!
Before that you can also just try an older version of proton. You might be on latest / experimental and it updated.
If it just started out of nowhere, and you haven’t updated recently, then check your heat, power and memory.
If you’ve updated recently, check and see what got updated and go back to the previous versions.
Maybe do a memtest to see if your ram is ok.
More info: MemTest86 is the standard. Put that on a flash drive, boot into it, and run it overnight. It needs to complete a full pass, which takes 4+ hours. A single failure or two is OK, any more is not.
If we are testing hardware, I would also suggest a CPU test with Prime95 an a GPU test with Furmark. Both of these tests are faster than the memory test, and you can always do them from a live linux environment if you want to remove your current installed OS as a factor.
Prime95 using the memory testing option might be sufficient to test RAM stability, too. When I was doing manual RAM overclocking, 30min was enough for a safe pass, but my errors typically appeared within 15min or less.
In case you’re dual booting - Windows also has a memory diagnostic tool. This did identify my RAM as broken almost immediately, while Memtest reported everything OK after a full scan of several hours. As I only knew Memtest back then it took me weeks to find why my PC was constantly randomly crashing, until I learned of that.
But that was about 2 years ago, so maybe Memtest did improve since then? (Or maybe I had some very weird behaving RAM and finding it with other tools was just pure luck…)
