NVIDIA + Fedora Updates = Choppy Framerate

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I’ve happily run Fedora for a few years now and noticed this unpredictable problem that goes something like this:

  1. I have an NVIDIA graphics card.
  2. Fedora install is working great.
  3. I generally run Software Update about once a month.
  4. I always wait 1-2 months before picking up the next major update.
  5. At some point I’ll pick up an update, reboot and now when I run Proton-virtualized Games, the framerate will be atrocious for some sequences (e.g. startup) but fine during gameplay.
    • Example: Deep Rock Galactic

I haven’t put any effort into figuring out what is going on here beyond some cursory searched from time to time, but if you’ve been in the Linux Desktop space for any amount of time, you know searching for “Linux + Nvidia + Framerate” is a lot like searching for “Weightloss Tips” and hoping for quality writeups.

BREAKTHROUGH: What caught my attention was a thread recently where someone with NVIDIA noted that “Always wait 5mins after applying the latest Fedora patches before updating, to give the NVIDIA kernel module a chance to rebuild”

I had never, ever heard this suggestion before and I’ve been dabbling in desktop Linux since 1998, so I went digging into the realm of “Fedora, forcing NVIDIA kernel module rebuild”

I came across this thread, specifically this post in the thread that provided tips on forcibly removing the NVIDIA kernel module, then re-adding it and giving it time to rebuild before restarting, specifically:

$ sudo dnf remove kmod-nvidia-{latest-version}
$ sudo akmods
Checking kmods exist for 6.3.11-200.fc38.x86_64            [  OK  ]
Building and installing nvidia-kmod
{... ran for 2-3 mins ...}
$ shutdown -r now

And now everything works smoothly again!

I get myself into this troublesome workflow using the Software Update center in Fedora – it will typically download the updates and then reboot to apply and apparently it’s not giving akmods a chance to rebuild the kernel module, but when I apply updates through the terminal I can just wait 5mins before restarting.

That’s a shame that it doesn’t seem to be aware of the need to wait here (the last update I did picked up the 5.35 package of NVIDIA through the Software Update center and sure enough everything went choppy after the restart.

Hope this helps!

Update

Ok that didn’t seem to do the trick with the choppy startup… I even cleared the Shader Cache in Steam to see if regenerating that would help and it did not… the research continues!

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