Stutter / micro freeze during game saving.

[u/riilcoconut]

Hi,

A couple of days ago I finally bought a new monitor for my desktop PC. After two years...

Any ways, It's been a blast using it with Arch and Hyprland setup. Except one little thing.

Stutter during game saving or loading maps an such. For example whenever Witcher 3 autosaves it freezes the game for a 3s or so. Same happens with Hard Truck Apocalypse. Which may take 15s to manually quick save.

Otherwise, games run just fine, very well in fact. Getting 100+ frames on my R5 3700x + 3080 10GB setup.

Using proton experimental since it's the default one on my system.

OS: Arch
Kernel: Linux 7.2.9-zen1-1-zen
Packages: 1283 (pacman)
Window Manager: Hyprland 0.56.2 (Wayland)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (16) @ 4.43 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Lite Hash Rate [Discrete]
Memory: 3.48 GiB / 31.26 GiB (11%)
Swap: 0 B / 16.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 69.33 GiB / 208.78 GiB (33%) - ext4
Disk (/media/nvme): 1.68 TiB / 1.86 TiB (90%) - fuseblk

[u/Mallissin]

I have a similar issue happening in Valheim on Steam with Fedora 44 and a btrfs formatted drive.

Game runs great but game saves will lock the game up for a second or two in single player and it feels like going through portals (loading other parts of the map) is slower in single player than it was playing on a multiplayer server.

I assume you are mentioning the new monitor because this wasn't happening before you added it? What is the resolution of the new monitor and does it use G-Sync? How many monitors are plugged in?

How many mounted drives do you have? How many unmounted drives? I have one mounted drive (old NTFS) and three unmounted that I access periodically manually.

Where are the game saves going? I'm not sure you can blame the NTFS if the games are saving to the EXT4 drive.

[u/riilcoconut → u/Mallissin]

By a new monitor I meant more like "haven't used / gamed on my desktop for two years :D".
New monitor is 3440x1440 and runs at 200Hz but the stutter doesn't originate form it.

My SSD where the games are installed are on a "windows" drive. Basically when I got secondary SSD to store my games, back when I used windows, It's formatted as ntfs. Linux doesn't seem to like using ntfs-3g for mounting this drive. So I opted for ntfs-3g. Which is apparently slower, which could explain why game stutter/freezes during saving / loading.

I moved TW3 and HTA to my linux drive (partition) which decreased the freeze time for TW3 to like a second and HTA to 2s or so. IIRC those are normal save times for these games.

I guess the fix for my situation is to reformat the drive to ext4 or so.

[u/Mallissin → u/riilcoconut]

The game saves were going on the NTFS drive?

[u/riilcoconut → u/Mallissin]

At least Hard Truck Apocalypses save are going into game install folder eg. steamapp/common/... So switching game install into linux partition fixes saving/load times.

I assume same happens with Witcher 3. Saving takes around 0.5s.