Ubuntu 18.04 Steam games frame rate drop

Question

I have quite a modern Laptop, HP OMEN With GTX1070 8GB Graphics and Corei77700HQ. Latest drivers from graphics-drivers ppa. All games start fine, after playing for a few minutes the frame drops to 15 fps. Then again after some time it returns back to full fps which is more than 75. Then this cycle continues and I can't play. This is a consistent behavior with 18.04 series and any distribution based on 18.04. I have a GSYNC Enabled Laptop screen which is only 1080p. I do not see this issue on any other distribution except Ubuntu base. I hear people saying that it could be Nvidia, If it was nvidia then it should happen to 16.04 too which it does not.

Can anyone help me please?

---

75FPS:-

affected_cpus                             0
cpuinfo_max_freq                          3800000
cpuinfo_min_freq                          800000
cpuinfo_transition_latency                0
energy_performance_available_preferences  default performance balance_performance balance_power power 
energy_performance_preference             balance_performance
related_cpus                              0
scaling_available_governors               performance powersave
scaling_cur_freq                          899381
scaling_driver                            intel_pstate
scaling_governor                          powersave
scaling_max_freq                          3800000
scaling_min_freq                          800000
scaling_setspeed                          <unsupported>

---

15FPS:-

affected_cpus                             0
cpuinfo_max_freq                          3800000
cpuinfo_min_freq                          800000
cpuinfo_transition_latency                0
energy_performance_available_preferences  default performance balance_performance balance_power power 
energy_performance_preference             balance_performance
related_cpus                              0
scaling_available_governors               performance powersave
scaling_cur_freq                          800030
scaling_driver                            intel_pstate
scaling_governor                          powersave
scaling_max_freq                          2800000
scaling_min_freq                          800000
scaling_setspeed                          <unsupported>

---

Again.

75 FPS

---

affected_cpus                             0
cpuinfo_max_freq                          3800000
cpuinfo_min_freq                          800000
cpuinfo_transition_latency                0
energy_performance_available_preferences  default performance balance_performance balance_power power 
energy_performance_preference             balance_performance
related_cpus                              0
scaling_available_governors               performance powersave
scaling_cur_freq                          900004
scaling_driver                            intel_pstate
scaling_governor                          powersave
scaling_max_freq                          3800000
scaling_min_freq                          800000
scaling_setspeed                          <unsupported>

Solution

After all this troubleshooting, I concluded that it is indeed overheating as suggested by Alan and Martin in Ubuntu Podcast Season 11 Episode 26. In Ubuntu 18.04 the thermald Daemon is enabled by default for maintaining the CPU Temperature. This should not impact generally as the danger thresholds are quite high. However in my particular case it was throttling the CPU to lowest frequency based on CPU Temperature, Which is expected. I think it is a bug with thermald. I have since tried thermald in other distributions on the same hardware and i could not reproduce the bug. So i decided to come back to Ubuntu again and this time disable thermald. It is now fixed. Thanks a lot to the ask Ubuntu community for their support and special shout out to Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress.

Solution:-

sudo systemctl disable thermald && sudo reboot.

P.S Note, Disabling thermald will let the temperatures to be unchecked, Please use this with caution. Last think we want is to fry someone's hardware. Thermald is there for a reason. Unless you are affected by this issue i do not recommend this solution.

Ever since Ubuntu Podcast Season11 Episode 28, Where Alan and Martin again read my answer and suggested me to file a bug report against thermald, I have been investigating the reasons for CPU Throttling in greater detail. I have seen occasional Throttling even after I disabled thermald. Courtesy of the gnome shell extension cpufreq, I was able to see that irqbalance was throttling my CPU and causing the Frame rate drops.

To prove this I enabled thermald and removed irqbalance package. Now, I get even higher FPS and there is no throttling at all.

I have been looking at the package irqbalance

Helpful Resource for irqbalance :- http://konkor.github.io/cpufreq/faq/

It states :-

irqbalance is not a part of the Linux kernel

It designed for special server configurations with many RAID/HDD/SDD controllers.

Any user-space application (like games, compilation…) can not get 100% of CPU resources on any thread because it’s always sharing this resources with IO tasks.

I think I can now consider this resolved

sudo apt remove irqbalance    

This is the actual solution!

Comments

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

Glad you found the answer. I was actually thinking of overheating causing slowdown yesterday.

[Rajat Pandita]

Well, Not sure what changed, However with the latest nvidia-430 Drivers issue is completely gone. Did a fresh install of KDE NEON which is based on 18.04.2 and all is working as expected. Not sure what to say.