I’ve been using Manjaro for years now, but recently (2-3 months) I’ve been experiencing seemingly random freezes of 1-5 seconds when playing games (Specifically CS:GO and Rocket League). In those 2-3 months I’ve changed pretty much every part of my PC and reinstalled Manjaro. I have windows in another HD and those games run fine without the random freezes in it.
I’ve ran memtest86+ to see if RAM was the issue (one of the few parts I did not change), but it does not seem to be the case. I’ve changed the MOBO, GPU, CPU, PSU and the problem persisted, so it shouldn’t be any of those. Now I suspect that the problem may be the M.2 drive that Manjaro is installed in, but I’m having a hard time testing this. I could install windows in it and see if it runs fine or install Manjaro in another drive, but I’d rather not. I tried running benchmarks on gnome’s disk utility, but there it seems fine.
Also one weird thing about the freezes is that only the game freezes, the system seems to be working fine. For example if a video is playing in another screen it does not freeze, or if while the game is frozen I can interact with firefox.
Does anyone have any ideas of things I could do to pinpoint the problem?
I have a suggestion that may be more relevant for KDE Manjaro… and a couple interesting things to share.
For me under KDE, I noticed I was experiencing some freezing when there was a lot of i/o related to baloo (a file indexer). As it turned out for me, some of my games (especially their addons) where writing lots of information back out to the disk during game play. An extreme example was that one addon for ESO had been continuously writing for months and had built up a 10MB data file that it was still writing to… and this was driving baloo nuts (which I also found to be rather flakey anyway as it was always hyper-inflating it’s index size). Needless to say I dumped that addon and it’s index file, and even decided to completely disable baloo and all my ESO freezes stopped.
And although not related to 1-5 second freezes, I recently found two very good performance enhancers for much smoother video performance/smoothness:
disable the compositor for your gaming sessions
if you have an amdgpu… look into enabling TearFree @ AMDGPU - ArchWiki. I use the command xrandr --output DisplayPort-0 --set TearFree on… but make sure to run xrandr -q first to make sure you are selecting the right monitor/connection (i.e. DisplayPort-0, DisplayPort-1, HDMI-A-0, etc…) and update the command appropriately
P.S. Another off the wall idea that might explain freezes “might” be… are your games installed on mechanical drives? And if so, have you looked into using hdparm @ hdparm - ArchWiki to disable APM, Acoustic, and Auto-suspend? i.e. hdparm -B255 -S0 -M0 /dev/sda
The compositor is already disabled. I just disabled baloo aswell, but I don’t think that is the problem. As for the gpu that I have it is a nvidia gpu, also some games are installed in an HDD and others in a NVME ssd and the freezes happen either way.
Just re-read that you changed pretty much every internal internal component… Maybe post the output of $ inxi -Fazy so folks can see what your working with.
Does you new Motherboard have an updated BIOS?
Are your BIOS settings “Safe Defaults”, or do you OC
Had you ever added any grub/boot commands for your previous hardware that might not be relevant any more and need to be disabled (or changed) for your new hardware?
Have you looked for clues in your journal around the freeze times to see if anything was going on in the background… $ journalctl --priority err --boot 0
I don’t know much about nVidia drivers under Linux, other than nouveau (open source) isn’t a good option for gaming… and from reading the release branches the past couple weeks I understand there has been some mention of certain proprietary driver versions needing more attention… but you’ll need someone with more nVidia experience to offer suggestions/guidance here
Does you new Motherboard have an updated BIOS?
Yes
Are your BIOS settings “Safe Defaults”, or do you OC
Defaults
Had you ever added any grub/boot commands for your previous hardware that might not be relevant any more and need to be disabled (or changed) for your new hardware?
Did not add any grub commands
Have you looked for clues in your journal around the freeze times to see if anything was going on in the background… $ journalctl --priority err --boot 0
Did not do that, will do it and report back.