I’ve been having inconsistent performance issues while playing FFXIV on Fedora/Nobara. I recently switched from EndeavourOS, and I’ve noticed that while my frame rates are generally good, they tend to drop significantly, especially in areas with a lot of activity, like the Dawntrail zones. My FPS fluctuates from around 90 down to 50-45 and in some cases even drops to 10 FPS for a few seconds. I’m using an NVIDIA RTX 2070 and XIVLauncher with the XLCore custom proton. I’ve checked my settings and am running some small mods like SimpleTweaks and NoClippy. After doing some digging, I found a few errors while using dmesg, but I’m stumped on how to resolve this. Any advice would be appreciated!
4 Answers
Just to double-check—do you have fsync and esync enabled in your XIVLauncher settings? Those can often help with frame rate stability.
It seems I found a fix. I installed the `kernel-tools` package and set my CPU to performance mode using the command `sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance`. That seems to have stopped the frame drops!
You might want to look into whether you’re using hybrid graphics. Try disabling your onboard GPU in the BIOS and see if performance improves when running solely on your discrete GPU. I’ve had FPS issues before with hybrid setups, and disabling the onboard GPU helped a lot for some games.
It sounds like the frame drops might not be directly related to your new distro. Have you checked for mods that could be causing issues? Also, take a look at your VRAM usage with nvidia-smi and see if dmesg logs anything right after a drop. Some players have complained about specific zones in FFXIV, especially in Dawntrail, so it could be a combination of that and your system settings. Seems like you’ve tried some good troubleshooting already!
I totally understand your frustration! I had similar problems before switching to another distro. Sometimes minor mods can cause performance dips too, even if they’re not big.
I actually found that fsync wasn’t enabled, but turning it on didn’t seem to change anything for me.