If you’d like to know more about this bug, I’ve had it before, here’s another post of mine showing it: https://lemm.ee/post/63660749
I can’t say that I’d noticed anything … but I’m always happy for fixes!
YYEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!!
LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
TLDR: mostly affected keyboard and mouse games that use X-input. Probably didn’t affect you if you didn’t use X-input like if you use SDL or
WG-input. They haven’t released the fix yet but there are simple workarounds in the thread.i had never heard of wg-input, and the one place that comes up when searching is the dolphin emulator repo. looks like a pretty new windows-specific API (they call it “GameInput”) that they say is a superset of all their earlier apis. don’t understand how that could then bork XInput if it’s already included.
My bad, I have no idea what other options there are in steam but I’m pretty sure you can use SDL for controllers which wouldn’t blow up xinput’s buffer
it’s an interesting case for sure. i’m assuming this is upwind of SteamInput because there’s no way to get the game itself to switch input stacks unless they’ve built in multiple ones.
my intuition tells me this happens because there are no event consumers for gamepads active when playing with keyboard, however that seems way too simplistic, all you need is a drain in that case.
Hell yes, I’ve been having this issue for a while and didn’t know where to even start debugging it
It’s happening to me in CS2 competitive. I suddenly have over 200ms ping for no reason.
Same here!! CS2 on steam deck. The frame rate plummets after just like 2 games, it’s horrendous!
Maybe that’s what I’ve been getting when I’m playing Cult Of The Lamb from Steam in Linux, which is a 2D game so hardly taxing my machine.
Didn’t notice anything like that on my GOG games started from Lutris.
This particular bug (from the OP) only affects games that use a lot of rapid mouse and keyboard inputs over the period of an hour or two.
And it only happens (weirdly) when you launch from steam, but have Steam Overlay turned off.
When launching from Steam, there is a layer that captures all keyboard and mouse inputs before they get to the game (for example, for capturing hotkeys to show the steam overlay). A separate layer called vulkan-steam-overlay (that is responsible for rendering the overlay over the game) periodically clears the input buffer so it doesn’t get too big. If steam overlay is disabled in settings, the input-capture layer is still used, but the vulkan-steam-overlay layer is not used. So the input buffer captures all inputs and never gets cleared, it gets so big it needs to start paging to disk. That is what introduces the lag spikes after an hour or two.
Launching from Lutris doesn’t use that input-capture layer, so that’s why it’s not affected.
I play Cult Of The Lamb with mouse and keyboard and the Crusades (basically sequences of fighting arenas) tend to be kinda insane in terms of the intensity with which you have to use them, so it makes total sense.
By the way, thanks for the very complete explanation.
My gut feeling told me it was some kind of memory leak (because those things tend to manifest themselves after some time of using the software, with some randomness on how long it takes for it to happen) but when I looked around I couldn’t find an explanation of its mechanism.
By the way the suggested workaround of adding LD_PRELOAD=“” in the Launch Options for the game seems to work.
Maybe the way those input capture layers work is by putting their input handling methods ahead of the default ones via LD_PRELOAD and forcing LD_PRELOAD to be empty means they’re not in the input processing pathway anymore?! (In all fairness, I can’t be arsed to dive into that codebase ;))
Didn’t notice anything like that on my GOG games started from Lutris.
Thanks for mentioning that.
As I consider getting back into Linux desktop despite 30 years of just using Linux via ssh, lutris seems to be part of my plan. It’s just GoG and WoW anyway, and I’m glad to know the perf may not be impacted by this bug. So thanks.
Yeah, I was in a very similar situation as you some months ago (decades of using Linux on an off for fun or at work mainly via command line), did the jump on my gaming PC and because my games are mainly from GoG went down the path of Lutris as a launcher for those games and am very happy with it, especially since it’s both integrated with GoG so can fetch your games from them AND it can handle the offline installers (you just do install from EXE and then chose the GoG script for that game to configure it).
In overall, the rate of failure or even just the rate of hassle (having to go and tweak stuff myself with Winetricks) is very low for GoG games as Lutris already comes with scripts for the vast majority of them that do the necessary Winetricks configurations automatically at the end of install plus in my experience it’s the DRM in games that generally screws Wine compatibility (to the point that at least one of my Steam games won’t work at all in Linux, but the pirated version of the same game works just fine),
There’s also benefits like being able to run the games wrapped in a firejail sandbox that disables networking and disables access to a bunch of other system features for security and privacy that you don’t have either with Steam or in Windows.
No idea how it handles WoW though, it’s been maybe a decade since last I used it.
Lutris and GoG is great.
You can log right into your GoG account via lutris and have immediate, in lutris, access to all the games you own to download/install and play.
That explains my experience in GunZ the other week…
GunZ is still around? I played that game back in the day. I remember the skill curve being somewhat vertical…
It lives on at Fgunz.net and I think there are some others. Skill curve the same, maybe more difficult because ppl are so good (not me).
So it’s probably pointless for a silver tier player like me to give the game a try then, huh?
It’s a fun game, and the movement system was not actually that hard to learn.
But the upper level players are all doing animation interrupts to put out crazy combos for much faster movement and attacks.
A beginner will learn these interrupts just by playing an hour or so, but chaining them? That takes skill and dedication beyond the norm.
I do remember winning the occasional match, but it was rare. Overall it was a fun game.
Okay yeah you’ve talked me out of it. I don’t want to play a game where you have to break/exploit the mechanics in order to compete. Thanks for the info.
I would say just try it. If you can master slash shot - jump slash switch to gun shoot - you can fight with guns. And sword you just need butterfly to be able to fight. I saw further down that you dont like that it is about glitches. But this is emergent gameplay. The devs never intended to create a game like this, but the players made it into our own thing by discovering all the glitches.
Edit. Even with out that there are so many guns and ways to play. I know some people who run around in gun games using only the dagger. Some people with a stun grenade and flamethrower, just press 2 buttons and the enemy vanishes without any glitches.
Wonderful news! Can’t wait for the update to release
In the meantime, feel free to try the
LD_PRELOAD="" %COMMAND%solution mentioned in the other post I linked.I’ve been doing that for a while yeah, it likes to break my steam overlay weirdly enough so it’s more annoying to invite friends lol, hence the hype around the update
Lol I have done it for a long time too and completely forgot about the bug or how I fixed it, and had no idea that’s why the overlay is broken too. At least now I understand and will be able to fix it when the update drops.
Ohhhh, I noticed that in RDR2 I think … though I haven’t noticed it in weeks.
I was starting to think I had a hardware problem. At least I found out before replacing anything.
Yay, I’d been having this issue in Baldur’s Gate 3.
And just after I unsubscribed because I got annoyed with the “I also have this issue” comments.Now to resubscribe and risk a bunch “I’m still having this issue - The fix isn’t released yet, wait until the next release”
Interesting. I have similar issues but it’s with streaming the game from PC to Deck etc. It will start to stutter and lag out, but if I turn off the device for a moment then back on it’ll reconnect and be fine thereafter
Does anyone have this issue where the steam login toast just nukes the fps of whatever you’re playing ? I completely have disabled the overlay because of that.
