Hi all, I have recently installed Bazzite, after previously being on Nobara.

I have been playing Dave the Diver and DOOM (2016), both through Steam, and I get pretty serious input lag. A second or more delay at times, generally when FPS is struggling.

I’m running on a laptop with integrated graphics, so the struggling integrated GPU is not a surprise, but I didn’t have this input lag issue with the same games on Nobara.

Any tips on a setting or something to help this?

I have lowered graphics settings to help with FPS, but ultimately I am not going to be able to avoid occasional FPS dips. The mouse input is instant, it’s just an issue with the keyboard.

Any help appreciated!

Edit with solution: it seems the problem is IBus, see this comment: https://lemmy.nz/post/23401044/15684126

Basically the solution is to add IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=2 to /etc/environment and restart.

  • talEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I don’t know what would cause a second or more of keyboard-specific delay.

    Hmm.

    I think the first step I’d try is running them in windowed mode with evtest running in a terminal alongside your game, so that you can see both at once. That can display a list of all keyboard events as they come in. If evtest is showing the events immediately as they come in, but Doom isn’t responding quickly, then the kernel is reporting the events quickly, and it’s Doom not processing them quickly. If evtest is delaying display, then there has to be something at the hardware or kernel level that’s problematic.

    That won’t alone solve your problem, but it’ll help narrow down what the cause is.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Thanks! evtest shows keyboard events happening immediately. The game seems to be the one slow to respond.

      • talEnglish
        31·
        3 days ago

        Hmm.

        Both games you listed appear to run in Proton.

        Dave the Diver is a Unity game, and Doom (2016) uses id Tech 6, so not a lot of common underlying technical infrastructure at the game level. I can’t imagine that it’s a common bug in both games.

        That does kind of suggest something related to Proton, between Linux and the game, but I don’t know of anything that could create a backlog at the Proton level. I mean, keyboard events aren’t terribly heavyweight.

        I haven’t played Doom (2016), but it’s a multiplayer game and some multiplayer games might have network latency for movement produce delay, but not for simply panning the camera — though I’d think that this would have more-sophisticated client-side prediction stuff; Quake II did. Dave the Diver is singleplayer, though, so if the mechanism is the same, shouldn’t be a network issue.

        I don’t know, frankly. Kind of drawing a blank. Maybe try, in Steam’s Compatibility settings for the game, a different version of Proton? Not that I can think of a specific mechanism that would cause this, but I can’t think of much else that would be shared between the games, wouldn’t affect the mouse, and would affect the keyboard, and that you could readily change.

        EDIT: One other possibility — maybe try disabling Steam Input for the game and see if it affects the issue? Steam does do some processing. I can’t think of any reason that it’d insert a lot of latency, but it’d be one of the few other things that would live between the kernel and the game.

        EDIT2: Actually, no…I don’t think that Steam Input touches keyboard input, based on a quick search. Just controller stuff.

        EDIT3: Oh, wait. Gamescope. I’ve never intentionally used it, but it’s some kind of mini-compositor that Steam uses.

        And it looks like it touches keyboard input:

        https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1460

        I don’t know much about Bazzite, but I understand that it’s a Fedora distro aimed at being an alternative to SteamOS, so I could believe that they use gamescope.

        kagis

        https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/gamescope-gamemode-for-desktop/3893

        With bazzite there is no need to install gamescope as it is baked onto the image

        It looks, from that page, like there’s some global toggle for gamescope, and people normally enable it on a per-game basis by adding it to the game’s launch properties in Steam, but I can’t give a lot of advice there; haven’t used it myself.

        I might try disabling gamescope, if you’re using it, and see if the issue vanishes.

        And…hmm…on that note, maybe also try disabling the Steam Overlay. That touches keyboard input, and also touches the video display.

        https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/3978-072C-18DF-FBF9

        Open the Steam client and navigate to the Steam > Settings > In-game tab. Toggle on Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game.

        Just to see if that makes the issue go away.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzOPEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          So this is a bit of a dumb solution, but I went to the accessibility settings in the OS and dropped the repeat frequency a bit. Now it seems to work fine!

          It did seem like the events were triggering faster than the games could process them, so dropping the repeat speed a little stopped the events queueing up.

          screen shot of accessibility setting to set the speed of repeating keys when a key is held down

          • BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            That’s getting old school. I had to do the same thing to get Shovel Knight to accept input properly about 10 years ago.

            I sent a message to the dev about it, but there wasn’t a Linux port yet so they were stumped. I changed the repeat rate of the key input in kde and there it went like magic.

          • talEnglish
            4·
            3 days ago

            Okay, sounds good! Glad to hear it.