Game starts lagging after ~1h play.

[Cray]

Game works just fine and runs smoothly, then after about an hour of play the draw time for frames goes up drastically and fps drops 20-30 frames/sec and makes the game all 'laggy'.

Has anyone else had this, or do you know tweaks/settings I can test to try fixing it?

About the behavior:

-only the frame time increases, I can see frames taking 10x longer to draw on the gpu graph.
-it only happens when turning or moving, at standstill the frametime graph flatlines.
-the cpu and gpu are running cool, nothing else is on in the background, and steam overlay is disabled.
-there's still plenty of vram left, and a good chunk of system RAM.
-only borderlands 3 has this issue for me.
-tried with -notexturestreaming, which works fine, but faces same issue.
-the game otherwise runs perfectly fine and smooth.
-no luck with upping/downing graphics settings so far.

System:

CPU: Intel i7-6700 (quad 3.4-4.0Ghz)
GPU: geforce gtx 1070 (8G vram)
RAM: 8GB (low, more in transit)
OS: Linux, Proton 9 and GE-Proton 9 tested

Launch options:
-nostartupmovies
-nosplash
-fullscreen
-dx11
-high
-useallavailablecores

To be clear:

1) I'm not expecting a flawless experience, some games still have hiccups on Linux, that's just how it is for now. The game is gold rated on protondb though, and others seem to just need the typical tweaks many windows users require and it runs fine.

2) 8GB is not a lot of ram (some sticks went missing) and I'm ordering more soon.

As goes for the ram, though, when the stutters start there's still at least a gig or two of ram left, and I threw in another 8 gigs of virtual memory on an nvme drive. That's still ~15 times slower than RAM, but it's workable and I did it mostly to see if the game is doing it because of free memory count (the virtual memory still shows up as available normal memory to processes).

I'll keep trying stuff, but until I get more RAM, and in case others face the same issue, it'd be nice to know if anyone's got some ideas.

[SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!]

Check if you have update for your gpu and your linux

[Cray]

Originally posted by SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!:

Check if you have update for your gpu and your linux

It's all up to date. I'll post after I get more RAM installed.

[Diogenes49]

that almost sounds like a heat issue have you cheeked cpu and gpu temperatures? also good to see a fellow linux user here

[Cray]

Originally posted by Diogenes49:

that almost sounds like a heat issue have you cheeked cpu and gpu temperatures? also good to see a fellow linux user here

temps are all fine. even while it's happening it doesn't seem to cause the gpu much stress, minus how frames draw extremely slowly when moving/turning.

viva libre!

[Aurora Kirin]

Originally posted by Cray:

Originally posted by Diogenes49:

that almost sounds like a heat issue have you cheeked cpu and gpu temperatures? also good to see a fellow linux user here

temps are all fine. even while it's happening it doesn't seem to cause the gpu much stress, minus how frames draw extremely slowly when moving/turning.

viva libre!

Probably just that your specs are old.
I don't have any issues and I'm only running 3060 Ti & i7 10700K. Mostly stable 100fps.
Check this sub-Reddit post, it might help.
This video might also help, I haven't watched it though.

[RoboSauce]

Have you tried setting a hard cap on framerate? That may help.

[Cray]

Originally posted by Blue North Star:

Originally posted by Cray:

temps are all fine. even while it's happening it doesn't seem to cause the gpu much stress, minus how frames draw extremely slowly when moving/turning.

viva libre!

Probably just that your specs are old.
I don't have any issues and I'm only running 3060 Ti & i7 10700K. Mostly stable 100fps.
Check this sub-Reddit post, it might help.
This video might also help, I haven't watched it though.

Already tried the stuff on reddit and other tweaks. yt vids on stuff like this are unfortunately usually just a less efficient communication of the same info, didn't find anything new there.

BL3 being from 2019 and the rig from 2016, just a 3 year gap, it's well within expected range of requirement. And the game runs perfectly fine for a full hour on high settings before choking on something very small and specific (increasing frame draw times), so I don't think it's the specs themselves. The GPU and CPU aren't even working hard.

Probably either an oddity of running on Proton, or the ram being low. Thx tho

[RGBA]

I started having the same issue, but with Wonderlands, which I think uses the same engine as BL3, some time after I upgraded from Ubuntu 22 to 24 and/or updated my GPU driver (prior to that, I was able to play the game through on the same hardware with no significant issues). In my case, after a consistent 35-40 mins of play, the frame rate drops to something like 5 fps, most noticeably when turning or moving. Quitting and relaunching restores normal frame rate, but only for another 35-40 mins.

I've tried lowering graphics settings, resolution and frame rate, and also DX11 and DX12 and multiple versions of Proton and GE-Proton, all to no avail. My system specs are as follows:

• CPU: Intel i9-9900 (8-core @ 3.6GHz)
  
• GPU: GeForce RTX 2080 Super 8GB
  
• OS: Linux (Ubuntu 24)
  
• RAM: 32GB

so I don't think insufficient RAM is the issue (at no time does the game use more than ~5GB of the 32GB total or more than ~6.5GB of the available 8GB VRAM). CPU and GPU temperatures are also always well within normal ranges.

This does feel like a thrashing issue though. Maybe the game should be reserving more memory than it does (FWIW, the -maxmem launch option seems to have no effect), but whatever the problem is, the game is borderline unplayable now. Pretty frustrating.

[Cray]

Originally posted by RGBA:

I started having the same issue, but with Wonderlands, which I think uses the same engine as BL3, some time after I upgraded from Ubuntu 22 to 24 and/or updated my GPU driver (prior to that, I was able to play the game through on the same hardware with no significant issues). In my case, after a consistent 35-40 mins of play, the frame rate drops to something like 5 fps, most noticeably when turning or moving. Quitting and relaunching restores normal frame rate, but only for another 35-40 mins.

I've tried lowering graphics settings, resolution and frame rate, and also DX11 and DX12 and multiple versions of Proton and GE-Proton, all to no avail. My system specs are as follows:

• CPU: Intel i9-9900 (8-core @ 3.6GHz)
  
• GPU: GeForce RTX 2080 Super 8GB
  
• OS: Linux (Ubuntu 24)
  
• RAM: 32GB

so I don't think insufficient RAM is the issue (at no time does the game use more than ~5GB of the 32GB total or more than ~6.5GB of the available 8GB VRAM). CPU and GPU temperatures are also always well within normal ranges.

This does feel like a thrashing issue though. Maybe the game should be reserving more memory than it does (FWIW, the -maxmem launch option seems to have no effect), but whatever the problem is, the game is borderline unplayable now. Pretty frustrating.

Well, at least it's useful to know it's not just my particular setup. Exactly the same behavior too, starts after a certain duration of play and only happens when turning and moving, gpu/cpu not working hard otherwise, settings have no effect, etc.

Usually the kind of behavior you'd see when something's caching wrong and that sort of thing, I believe.

[noob101]

I have a potatoes laptop. Nowhere near the specs u guys have. windows i3 12th gen 8gb ram , built in graphics. 500gb M.2 . Game was working without changing anything. But I recently got all the expansions. And it did the same lag n cut off after awhile of playing. I found a fix to change it to dx11 from 12. N it worked for a bit but now lagging again after awhile. Verified game files, gave admin access, full screen optimizations off. Settings low and res low. No changes

[rokNroll]

This seems to be a Steam Linux issue. Got this strange lag after playing for about 40-50 minutes all of a sudden 2 weeks ago (only) in BL3 on a system with Manjaro, Ryzen 7700, 32GB RAM and a Radeon 7800XT.

Tinkering with the graphics settings did not help (no texture streaming, low volumetric fog, more memory for textures etc.).

See this[github.com] and this[github.com] Github issue for explanations.

You could try

LD_PRELOAD="" %COMMAND%

in game's Properties > General > Launch options.

I am using

LD_PRELOAD="" %command% -high -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -NoStartupMovies -NoLauncher

. No lag since then.

[RGBA]

No lag for me anymore either, so thanks for pointing out the workaround!