Hello all. I’ve recently installed Fedora 42 on my laptop, it’s a microsoft surface laptop studio so it’s running with the custom surface kernel. The feature matrix on their github page says that everything should be supported for my laptop and that’s pretty much been my experience so far but I’ve been having issues when testing out games.
The laptop has a 3050TI and is more than capable of running most of the games that I usually play on windows, and I’ve almost gotten it working on Fedora. They’ll launch and run just fine, everything even looks pretty decent graphically, but it just has really bad stuttery input lag, even in more lightweight games that I’ve tested such as balatro and stardew valley.
I’m not sure what would be causing this, as far as I’m aware I’m running the right gpu driver, I’ve double checked that they’re using the dedicated gpu rather than the integrated one with nvidia-smi, but honestly that’s about the extent of my knowledge. Does anyone have any thoughts / suggestions? It would be much appreciated.
Two things:
- What input device(s) are you using? Are you using the built-in laptop keyboard, or a gamepad of sorts. (By Balatro, I’d assume it might even be happening with mouse.)
- Are you running these games on a platform like Steam, or are you running another way? (I’m assuming the answer is yes to Steam, by Balatro and Stardew.)
For Steam, try messing around with Steam input settings and see what happens.
Have you tried the default Fedora kernel? Also you didn’t install TLP did you?
Get resource usage under utilization and nvidia-smi output and post here.
Also, are you sure it’s input lag, or is the entire machine pausing and hiccuping?
This kind of problem is going to require some deep debugging of the surface kernel drivers. This isn’t going to be a simple or quick fix. Somebody is going to need to do some extensive debugging and analysis to chase down an issue like this. A solution to this problem could take a few hours, or it could take a few months of meticulous trial and error to narrow down the problem space and gather enough data to enable somebody to zero in on the problem.
If you want to dive into tracking down the problem yourself, I suggest starting with the kernel’s own docs on the driver architecture and debugging tools, etc.
