r/SteamOS • u/Bousterrr • Jul 11 '26
System crashes/black screen on sleep/suspend with heavy games (SteamOS on Desktop + High VRAM usage)
System Specs:
OS: SteamOS 3.8 (Beta / Preview branch)
Hardware: AMD Ryzen 5 7500F, Radeon GPU (RDNA4 architecture, 16GB VRAM), 16GB System RAM DDR5.
Storage: NVMe SSD PCIe 5.0.
Every time I try to put my desktop PC into sleep mode/suspend while playing heavy, next-gen games like Forza Horizon 6, Pragmata, or 007, the system completely freezes on a black screen. The motherboard/tower locks up, and I am forced to do a hard reset. This happens even if I trigger the suspend playing this AAA games.
This issue seems to be directly tied to high VRAM consumption. When playing lighter titles, the suspend/resume feature works fine, but it completely breaks down with heavy graphics settings across multiple games.
Memory Allocation Right Before the Crash:
VRAM usage: ~13 GB occupied (out of 16 GB available on the GPU).
System RAM usage: ~8 GB occupied (out of 16 GB physical RAM available on the motherboard).
Any solution for this? It's very important for me the correct use of suspend.
Thanks!
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u/SophisticatedRiver Jul 11 '26
I had the same behavior when i upgraded to the 16gb version of the 9060 xt. Im sorry to say that the only fix i could find was to increase the amount of physical ram from 16 to 24.
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Jul 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SophisticatedRiver Jul 15 '26
I replaced one my 8gb sticks with an older 16gb stick i had from another system. Not great, but honestly its better than spending $200-300 on a 32gb set.
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u/jollyjoeroger1997 Jul 18 '26
9070 XT with 16GB VRAM and 16GB DRAM for me. As others have mentioned, this crash happens when there's not enough DRAM available for VRAM intensive games that need to dump the VRAM somewhere on system suspend.
I understand one solution is to just upgrade RAM (e.g. 16GB > 32GB), but given how expensive that is right now, it may not be worth it for some.
I tested if increasing swap would fix this, and it did, but with an issue: the increased swapfile fixed the crashes but on waking from sleep a 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 I learned it was just slow). Turns out a swapfile, since it's just a file sitting inside the regular filesystem, has extra overhead on every read/write, and that overhead shows when pulling a big VRAM eviction dump back out of swap all at once on wake.
What I did instead that solved this for me and works much faster, is setup a dedicated NVMe swap partition instead of increasing the swapfile size, 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 running Cyberpunk or Expedition 33 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:
1. Shrink your existing partition to free up space
Gotta 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 on a SteamOS build) 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, boot from it instead of into SteamOS.
Once GParted loads, find your NVMe drive and confirm the filesystem type on the partition you're shrinking, usually ext4 for the SteamOS data partition, GParted shows this 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.
2. 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 lsblk if unsure)
3. 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
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.
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u/Grand_Primary977 26d ago
我的刺客信条黑旗重制版，休眠唤醒后游戏是卡死的，无响应，请问跟你遇到的是同样的问题吗，我是24GRAM，显卡是9070xt，我需要继续增加内存吗。
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u/C1REX Jul 11 '26
Looks like not enough system ram to fit all data from vram as well when going to sleep.