Performance drops and random crashes

Hi! Brand new user here, I originally moved from W11 to Bazzite. All of my games seemingly drop FPS to 30-45 at max. An hour ago I was playing games normally at 120 FPS, and my GPU/CPU didn’t seem to struggle at all. My GPU is normally at 85-99 and my CPU will typically be around 40-60. Temp is normal too.

Opening firefox or alt tabbing would crash my game sessions, sometimes the entire OS. I updated the BIOS and tried some other fixes to see if that would help and it seemed like it did for a bit.

Now the games I run like marvel rivals for example locks at 30 FPS. All settings are the lowest possible and I have no frame regen enabled. Occasionally the game will still crash despite nothing running in the background except steam and the game.

I’m not quite sure what to do from here, and I haven’t really found an answer through looking. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m also not sure how to receive logs and post them here.

Midas06•12/19/25, 10:07 PM

What hardware are you running on?

bubblesOP•12/19/25, 10:11 PM

I included the specs in the photo. The RAM is the only thing not there. It is corsair vengeance LPX 16 GB DDR4 3200

Midas06•12/19/25, 10:47 PM

Ahhh, not a handheld. Then it's not the thing i was thinking

Midas06•12/19/25, 10:47 PM

carry on

MMidas06 Ahhh, not a handheld. Then it's not the thing i was thinking

bubblesOP•12/19/25, 11:08 PM

Do you have any other idea what it could be?

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 12:27 AM

My guess would be RAM running out, especially if you have Firefox in the background with 16GB of memory

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 12:27 AM

running Overwatch 2 for me means I have to watch if Firefox is running, to avoid running out of RAM

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 12:28 AM

If you run System Monitor on a second monitor (or otherwise monitor how much RAM is free), try to determine if you're running low on memory when a crash happens?

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 12:28 AM

Otherwise you can do stuff ujust logs-this-bootujust logs-this-boot after a crash, and post the last 100 lines of the log or whatever. Someone here can look over it.

AAgentElrond Otherwise you can do stuff `ujust logs-this-boot` after a crash, and post the la...

bubblesOP•12/20/25, 12:58 AM

Thanks! I’ll try running the command when it crashes.
On the other hand, is there a way to determine what is causing the FPS drops? I don’t have a second monitor and it doesn’t necessarily crash when it’s low FPS.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:05 AM

That's a harder thing to say.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:05 AM

Just as an example on my system: I can run System Monitor on a second screen, and watch the CPU / GPU usage that way.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:06 AM

Or if you have learned about the Mango overlay, that can show your usage in a corner of the screen on top of a game (don't worry if you haven't seen it).

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:06 AM

In one of my games, when the framerate drops, I see my GPU usage goes low, but my CPU usage is very high.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:06 AM

That tells me that my CPU is struggling to do something (in my case, probably compiling shaders, and my CPU is very old...) while the GPU is just sitting there idle.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:06 AM

When the game is running well, both CPU and GPU usage are pretty high, like for example 80% and 80%.

AgentElrond•12/20/25, 1:07 AM

Summary: You will have to gather information, and it can be frustrating at times until the solution is figured out.

Performance drops and random crashes

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