Stuttering in games when moving the mouse

Greetings guys. I run fedora 41, and I upgraded from 40 a couple of months ago. For what seems to be close to a couple of months now, I’ve had issues with the nvidia drivers, specifically versions 565 and 570 (both 570.124 and 570.133, which are the latest as of now). I’m able to run games (either from steam or from wine itself) just fine, with the performance I expect, but after about an hour into a game the pc will stutter quite a lot, to the point said game becomes unplayable, specifically when I move my mouse. This happens only inside the game however, doesn’t happen in the desktop. The issue doesn’t seem to be game-specific, since it happens on a few games I play nowadays (namely marvel rivals, elder scrolls online, and borderlands 3). A short list of things I’ve tried are:

  • Re-installing the nvidia drivers and waiting for the kernel modules to be built before rebooting
  • Downgrading to an older version of the nvidia driver (the current version of my distribution can only go down to version 565, which like I mentioned above, has the exact same issue; in fact, it’s the first driver version I’ve had this issue pop up)
  • Playing the same game(s) on windows - they run just fine, no issues
  • Tried playing the same games on a different system with the same versions of drivers and the same linux distribution - same issues appear in the exact same fashion

I think I want to try a wayland window manager, just in case I’m able to solve this stuttering mess (I’ve been running openbox for a few years with no problems), but I’m starting to believe it’s not a display server/window manager thing, since the same exact issue appears on 2 different systems. I also doubt it’s the graphics card, since it’s a gtx 1660, which can handle the games I brought as an example just fine.

With that said, I have no idea what should I try next? Could it be x11? Is it indeed an issue with the actual driver which means I have to sit back and wait until it’s fixed? Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

This is a well documented issue with Steam since they added screen recording. The most widely used fix is to add LD_PRELOAD=“” to your game launch parameters.

That didn’t always fix it for me, so now I run what games I can through Lutris.

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Interesting…now that you mention it, I was able to play jak x on pcsx2 for a few hours recently, with no hiccups whatsoever. I’ll give this a shot. If I recall correctly I’ve disabled screen recording on steam though.

Some other folks say changing the game recording mode in the Steam Settings to “Manual” instead of “Disabled” helps, but that didn’t resolve it for me. Might be something else to try.

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Weirdly the only game i’ve noticed having this kind of issue for me has been CS2 but it doesn’t occur immediately it takes a while before it happens but happens eventually every time i play, No idea what triggers it.