this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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PSA: Flatpak likes to mess with GPU drivers. If you experience terrible performance with Flatpak Heroic, try this (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by squaresinger@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Disclaimer: Someone in the comments pointed out that this affects Nvidia only. I don't have AMD, so I can't verify if that's correct, but likely this is only for fellow sufferers of the Green Nightmare.

I had this issue for months. Randomly, the performance for games would be abysmal (I'm talking 5 FPS in 10yo indie 3D titles). Then it would randomly work again for a few days or weeks until it would become terrible again.

Turns out, the reason for that was that flatpak appears to cause trouble when the system GPU driver is updated, but flatpak update isn't run. So when I did dnf update (and it updated the Nvidia driver) without running flatpak update afterwards, the performance would suck, until something (or I) ran flatpak update again.

So if the performance in games launched through a flatpak version of a launcher like heroic sucks, run flatpak update.

And if that doesn't work, run

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-575-64-05 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-575-64-05

(Replace the version with your Nvidia driver version, and in case of AMD, google whatever the appropriate way is to install the drivers for flatpak.)

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What really tripped me up is that apparently either flatpak, heroic or proton has some kind of software rendering mode that works but is crazy slow. I expected driver problems to cause everything to just not work at all. Instead, everything slowed to a crawl and I couldn't figure out why.

[–] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah I also thought the same thing. It's interesting that it still works, just really poorly.