[RESPONDED] Gaming experience: games freeze and crash

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

Hello everyone,

I have the following problem with my Framework 13: Nearly all games I tried will freeze and then crash after some time. The symptoms are always the same: The game runs perfectly fine (considering the hardware) with a stable, high framerate and everything. And then suddenly the video freezes while the sound still continues for some time. Then the game crashes, or I have to kill the process manually. No error messages (except very generic ones). Here is a short list of examples, sorted by the frequency of crashes (beginning with very rare crashes, ending with completely unplayable): Witcher 3, Rocket League, Space Engineers, Minecraft (modded), Beyond All Reason, Watch Dogs, GTA 5.
As you can see, the issue persists throughout all kinds of games: It doesn’t matter whether the game runs natively or through Proton. Every game with heavy enough graphics seems to crash eventually, the only difference is how long it takes (which varies a lot).

I couldn’t find anything helpful in game logs yet. Does anyone have similar experiences or suggestions for what I could try to narrow the problem down? I would also like to hear about your Linux Gaming experiences on the Framework Laptop: Is stable gaming possible on the Framework under Linux?

my setup:
CPU: i7-1260p
RAM: Crucial 32GB dual-rank memory
SSD: WD Black SN850 2TB
Distro: Arch Linux (kernel 6.3.4) running Sway WM with all necessary packages installed for the igpu to work (according to arch wiki)

2

Hello @Julian_Partanen , welcome back to the forums :slight_smile:

are these running under steam? also can you link the arcg wiki that you followed?
when running the game can we see the memory usage? via top. thanks.

3

Hi @Loell_Framework, thanks for responding and looking into this :slightly_smiling_face:

some of them are (e.g. Witcher 3, Space Engineers, Rocket League, …), some of them are not (e.g. GTA V and Watch Dog which I own on Epic Games and run through Heroic Games Launcher and Beyond all Reason which has its own launcher).

Sure, they basically just say which packages to install for the Intel iGPU:
Intel graphics
Hardware video acceleration

I made this screenshot while GTA V was freezing. A couple of seconds later it crashed:

2023-05-31T20:54:45,970205327+02:00
2023-05-31T20:54:45,970205327+02:001920×1059 210 KB

4

I would assume this is from dmesg? what are the generic errors? can you post some snippets? thanks.

5

@Loell_Framework I ment error messages from the games or launchers. If I get any, then they just say “Game crashed” or engine exited with code 1 or something like that. The only messages I get from dmesg (at the moment of the crash) are the ones you see in the picture, but since this message also appears when I start a game, I didn’t think it was important.

2023-06-04T19:31:50,792809487+02:00
2023-06-04T19:31:50,792809487+02:001117×58 38.7 KB

6

Do you happen to have xf86-video-intel installed? I believe this is the rough equivalent of xorg-x11-drv-intel on Fedora. Prior to removal I would get occasional grpahics freezes, and crashes. Once I removed it…well the last crash I had was in February.

7

Unfortunately I have not. Thanks anyway! :slight_smile: