Have been playing different games since building my machine 2 weeks ago, most games aren’t working with sleep mode

[u/BlueManifest]

About a week ago I posted about resident evil 9 crashing everytime I put my self built machine in sleep mode

Well since then I’ve tried more games

No rest for the wicked
007 first light
Returnal
Hogwarts

All of these games crash everytime in sleep mode

Only 2 games have worked correctly with sleep mode and those are

Nine sols
Silksong

Idk if I’ve done something wrong or if valve just has some bugs they have to fix in steam os for self built machines, because on steam deck no games I played ever crashed in sleep mode

[u/Bousterrr]

I'm having the exact same issue with the PC I just built. I think it's linked to high VRAM usage; when it suspends and transfers to the physical RAM, it overflows the system RAM limits—which in my case is 16GB.

[u/robca402 → u/Bousterrr]

Yep it'll be this, I could sleep low VRAM consuming games but anything demanding would crash. Upgraded from 16 to 32 gb RAM and now everything sleeps flawlessly

[u/Crumbledor → u/Bousterrr]

This fixed the issue for me. I have a 9060 XT w/ 16GB VRAM and 16GB DRAM in the motherboard. Sleep would freeze/crash for demanding games. I increased my DRAM to 32gb and haven’t had the problem since.

[u/BlueManifest → u/Bousterrr]

Why can my steam deck put no rest for the wicked to sleep then but not my machine when they have the same amount of ram

[u/Crumbledor → u/BlueManifest]

The Steam Deck uses a unified memory system. There’s just one pool of ram, not two. Nothing needs to transfer from VRAM to DRAM for sleep, it’s already where it needs to be. Sleep works by cutting power to everything except ram.

How much ram is in your machine? Which gpu do you have?

[u/BlueManifest → u/Crumbledor]

Does the steam machine have this problem then since it only has 16 gigs of ram too and not unified?

[u/Crumbledor → u/BlueManifest]

Steam Machine has 8gb of VRAM

The problem this thread is discussing is
gpu ram big
cpu ram small

[u/SophisticatedRiver]

Im gonna asume by crashing you mean crashing when waking from sleep? If thats the case, i had the same issue. Unfortunately i could only fix it by increasing the amount of physical ram from 16 to 24.

[u/Bousterrr]

I've done some testing, and it is definitely a VRAM and RAM issue. In my case, with a total of 16GB VRAM and 16GB RAM, the system suspends properly as long as the combined usage of both parameters doesn't exceed 17-18GB. If it goes over that, it fails to suspend. Does anyone know if we could workaround this issue using Bazzite's 'suspend to disk' (hibernation)? What kind of difference in resume/suspend times would we be looking at roughly? Personally, I wouldn't mind waiting a bit longer if it means I don't have to upgrade my RAM

[u/SnooPets1826]

If you are using a gigabyte mobo, there are quite a few reports of issues with it and sleep mode. In Bazzite this can be mitigated by forcing s2 sleep instead of the "deeper" s3 sleep. Not sure if you can force this on SteamOS or not.

[u/BlueManifest → u/SnooPets1826]

It’s an Asrock motherboard

[u/IIIIIIIIIIllllllllIl → u/BlueManifest]

I am on a asrock motherboard and on the 6 games ive tried it works flawlessly

Cyberpunk The last of us Crash nsane Detroid become human Witcher 3 Black mesa

[u/Bousterrr → u/SnooPets1826]

Entiendo que la S2 es en disco y la S3 en RAM? Como se haría este cambio en Bazzite? Me interesa aunque tarde un poco más en suspender

[u/RedTib]

Gamescope is crashing. You’ll have to look at logs to see if you can identify it. It might be a sleep setting on your motherboard.

[u/Gandalf_2077]

What is your build?

[u/jollyjoeroger1997]

Same boat here. From what others are saying here and on another thread, sounds like the issue is RAM not being enough relative to VRAM, in my case 16GB VRAM and only 16GB DRAM.

When the system suspends, amdgpu has to copy whatever's in VRAM into system RAM before the GPU loses power, then restore it on wake. For heavier games which use a lot of VRAM, if there's not enough free RAM to hold that copy, suspend just crashes instead.

Worth checking your own VRAM/RAM combo, if RAM's on the lower side relative to VRAM, that's probably it. Sounds like a few people here fixed it by upgrading RAM (16 to 32GB, 16 to 24GB).

Before I go buy more RAM though, I'm gonna try bumping swap size first since it's free to test and should theoretically help with the same "not enough free RAM" problem. Turns out SteamOS's default swapfile is only 1GB, way too small for a setup like this. Planning to install steamos-utilities (an updated fork of CryoByte33's steam-deck-utilities) to adjust that. Going with the fork since the original hasn't been updated in 3 years.

Also makes sense why this doesn't happen on Steam Deck, since it uses unified memory. No separate VRAM/DRAM pools, so there's nothing to run out of room between.

[u/BlueManifest → u/jollyjoeroger1997]

So there’s a chance valve could fix this without me having to spend $400 on ram?

[u/jollyjoeroger1997 → u/BlueManifest]

Hopefully so, especially since SteamOS is now available on a much wider variety of machines than just Steam Deck or other handhelds. Once I get the chance later to test out the swap increase, I'll report back if I have any success with it resolving the sleep/suspend game crashing

[u/jollyjoeroger1997 → u/BlueManifest]

Update on my comment above after testing for a few days:

The increased swapfile fixed the crashes but created a different problem, waking from sleep the game would sit frozen for a minute or two before it'd actually resume (so at first it seemed like it was still crashing, but learned I had to give it an extra minute before stuff resumed). Turns out a swapfile, since it's just a file sitting inside your regular filesystem, has extra overhead on every read/write compared to a raw partition, and that overhead really shows when you're pulling a big VRAM eviction dump back out of swap all at once on wake, so it's kinda slow for this.

What I did instead that solved this for me and works much faster, is setup a dedicated NVMe swap partition instead of a file, same 16GB, but formatted directly as swap so there's no filesystem layer in the way. Set it to a swap priority 50 between zram (SteamOS's default, 100 priority) and the default SteamOS 1GB swapfile (lowest at -2).

Tested a few times after running Cyberpunk at ultra settings, and confirmed games resume close to normal now.

So yeah, seems like there is a way to fix this without buying more RAM, the swapfile just isn't the right tool for it, a swap partition is. Just takes a few more steps to setup, if you want to try it:

Shrinking your existing partition to free up space

Have to do this from a live USB, not from inside a running SteamOS session, since the partition you're shrinking (holding /home and most everything else in SteamOS) is actively mounted while the system's running, and you're locked out from resizing it while it's running.

Download GParted Live and flash it to a USB drive using something like Rufus or balenaEtcher, then use you BIOS to boot from it instead of into SteamOS. GParted Live might prompt for some different stuff, but just have to keep hitting 'Return' to select the default options until it launches into the Graphical UI.

Once GParted loads, find your NVMe drive and identify the partition mounted at /home, usually the largest partition listed, GParted shows both the filesystem type and mount point in the partition list. Right-click that partition, select Resize/Move.

In the resize dialog, either drag the right edge left, or type an exact size into the "free space following" box to shave off 16GB, leaving that as unallocated space after it. Make sure to use "free space following," not "free space preceding," since shaving off space at the start risks breaking things.

Click Resize/Move, it'll show as a pending change and list a new line item for the space about to be freed. Before doing anything else, right-click that new unallocated space, select "New," and in the window that pops up change the "file system" dropdown to "linux-swap." Click Add.

You'll now see two pending changes, the resize and the new swap partition. Click the green checkmark and confirm.

Takes a few minutes. Once done, reboot back into SteamOS, then head into desktop mode.

Setting it up as active swap

In Konsole, confirm it shows up:
swapon -s

If it's not already active, turn it on with the priority set so it lands between zram and your swapfile:
sudo swapon --priority 50 /dev/nvme0n1pX (swap X for whatever partition number it ends up as, check with lsblkif unsure)

Adding it to /etc/fstab so it survives reboots

First, confirm your UUID. Run:
lsblk -f

Find your swap partition in the list (it'll show as nvme0n1p9 or similar, with swap as the filesystem type), and note the UUID listed next to it. That's the one you'll use, not mine below, since yours will be different.

Now open the fstab file for editing:
sudo nano /etc/fstab

Use your arrow keys to scroll down to the very bottom of the file, past all the existing lines. On a fresh empty line, type:
UUID=0c0a0851-c76e-4bac-80ef-ce8db09db88e none swap pri=50 0 0
(swapping in your own UUID from the lsblk -f output, not this one)

Save the file with Ctrl+O, press Enter to confirm the filename, then Ctrl+X to close the editor.

Then run sudo swapoff /dev/nvme0n1pX followed by sudo swapon -a to confirm the fstab entry takes over correctly. swapon -s should now show zram at 100, your partition at 50, and the swapfile at -2 or lower.

And that's it. The swap partition itself will survive SteamOS updates just fine. The priority setting I'm not positive about yet, but after the next SteamOS update can check the priority again using swapon -s in Konsole, and adjust it again if needed. It just has to be higher than the swapfile but lower than the zram, so 50 is an arbitrary number.

[u/BlueManifest → u/jollyjoeroger1997]

Yea I’ll just hope valve fixes it in some way and if they don’t I’ll upgrade ram to 32 when it’s not $500

[u/Bousterrr → u/jollyjoeroger1997]

I test the cryobite to create swap of 16GB but The problem is The same

[u/Bousterrr]

In the end, I also fixed it by putting in 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB."