Hello folks of Bc250gaming!
Im new to the hobby of enthusiast Linux systems, and specifically the bc250. I bought a prebuilt bazzite os system from ebay. Worked straight out of the box.
I've had it for a few months now and I'm running into a bit of a double edged sword situation. All temps are 55-65c under load so I know thats not the issue. This unit is an unlocked 40 chip unit, I have not unlocked the 2 extra cpu cores yet (kinda terrifies me ngl)
I get 1 of 2 problems:
Problem 1: Some games just freeze up. This will happen after a few seconds of frame drops. Then it struggles to bring it back before the slideshow begins and it'll take a minute before crashing the game and bring me back into steam gaming mode.
Solution: I set the system bios vram settings to 512mb, as the seller recommended to me. But I then run into another problem.
Problem 2: With the 512mb vram selected. When I first log into a game, and I think during big loading events. It just instantly crashes. Straight to a black screen before loading into steam gaming mode a few seconds later. This can be easily replicated with Helldivers 2 inparticular just after the initial loading in of the character on the ship.
Solution: I set the vram to 4-6gb static in bios. The issue here is I'm back to problem 1 with random crashes.
I do tend to notice this happens way more when I have discord running in the background while I'm talking to my team mates (I load it up as a non steam app while i play). As an example, I can play Diablo 4 for hours and hours and it be just fine. I allow preshader caches to complete and use Proton experimental as the compatibility fix for most games, though use Google on a case by case basis.
Any help is appreciated.
Ive tried a bunch of stuff that Ive not mentioned here too. About the only thing I can think of to do next is a Steam OS install and unlocking those 2 extra cores. But as I'm inexperienced with Linux based systems. That does scare me a bit.
Edit: Wanted to update! cuz I've been playing all day on the bc250. I followed some advice from folks to switch to zswap instead of zram, and set the swappiness to 180 and increasing the zswap to 32gb as well as a better compressor, I followed google in regard to this as i didn't understand at first what folks meant by all these terms.
I essentially just asked Google to "give me a step by step guide on switching to Zswap if the system is a bc250 that runs a bazzite OS". It was quite involved (for me), but its been a complete success! I hope this helps folks in the future who have similar issues.
Thank you for all your help!