I am running into a bit of an issue with bazzite-nvidia-open freshly installed on a “gaming” laptop. ( i5-12500h + 4060 mobile)
The system installed fine and the nvidia driver appears loaded corectly ( nvidia-smi provides the relevant information for the card) so at first glance everything seems fine. Trouble starts when i try to run a game (in this case D4 so a DX12 title running via Proton11 and VKD3D). At first glance the game runs fine in the menu, maybe a little overloaded on the GPU but still reaching the desired 60 fps (display is 60Hz so no need for anything else). Even in the menu the FPS values seem to be periodically going all over the place from 66 to 42, when i actually go into the game the overall FPS tanks to around 25.
While investigating the issue I can see in the PowerMizer from nvidia settings that the card is apparently boosting the clocks for the gpu and memory but via mangohud i can see the power hovering below 50W (the card is supposed to go to 60W normally and boost to 70W)
At this point i took a look at the nvidia services that are supposed to be running and noticed nvidia-powered (the one that is supposed to control power boost ) is not running.
○ nvidia-powerd.service - nvidia-powerd service
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-powerd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
└─10-timeout-abort.conf
Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition unmet at Sat 2026-07-18 14:46:35 EEST; 4min 16s ago
└─ ConditionPathExistsGlob=/dev/nvidia* was not met
Jul 18 14:46:35 panda systemd[1]: nvidia-powerd.service - nvidia-powerd service skipped, unmet condition check ConditionPathExistsGlob=/dev/nvidia*
I have enabled supergfxctl as per the FAQ but this did not help. Both nvidia-powered and nvidia-persistanced are off with the same error. If i manually enable them once i am logged into the system it doesn’t seem to help.
On arch installed on the same hardware this issue is not present. I took a look at the nvidia-powered.service provided by nvidia in their driver package and cannot find that start condition.
I do indeed have a laptop, mentioned it at the start, and it is a supported configuration for nvidia-powered.
You can achieve the override just by doing sudo systemctl edit service_name and in the case of nvidia-powered just removing the condition seems to fix it. The only place where i have seen that condition added to the service file is in the negativo17 drivers and i honestly don’t understand the point of it (the comit for it is don’t load nvidia-powered if the card is not present - if i don’t have a card installed why would i install the driver for it… )
There seems to be more wrong with the driver (or maybe scheduler, or who knows, i can’t even begin to diagnose this). Even with nvidia-powered running in game i am getting the gpu running at 98-99% load and 70+ degrees on 30 to 40W and the CPU at 16-25% but 98-100 degrees and average fps of 50. The same hardware should run the same game with the same settings much cooler and smoother. On arch the gpu sits at 65% around 60-66 degrees and 45-50w with the cpu at 20% and 70-85 degrees all with a solid 60fps (but it can do more, i just cap it at 60)
Taking the arch usage and temps as a baseline there seems to be something very wrong somewhere in bazzite. Thing is it didn’t use to be like this. At the end if last year i had spent quite a few months on bazzite and performance had been fine.
Yes I forgot about that, just used to doing it a certain way. Thanks for reminding me, I thought since no one had responded to your topic I would see if I could be helpful because these forums seem to be quite quiet/dead having spent here a few days now
I was never big on keep stats. I don’t recall what they were when I was using Arch but all my games just perform the same, don’t see a different there.
I noticed the place is a bit of a ghost town but i figured maybe out of the people here we might find a reasoning. Thanks for your reply.
As for the stats, i wouldn’t bother too much since i don’t need anything above 60fps but i have been playing this game for 3 years on various distros so i have good ideea of what to expect. It’s strange.
I actually didn’t like all the extra stuff that Bazzite came with even though it’s a nice out of the box setup. I actually setup my own image based off the Ublue Silverblue image and then added all the things I need as rpm’s into the image and set a bunch of default flatpaks. Maybe it’s worth having a look at for you to see if that makes a difference for your Nvidia gpu?
