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.)
Note: This issue only applies to Nvidia, AMD users can have a completely different versions of Mesa installed on their system and in Flatpak. Nvidia drivers are closed source and they ship both the kernel and userspace drivers as one with no backwards compatibility so Flatpak must always use the exact same version as the system.
Praise AMD
Sadly, there’s close to no AMD dGPU laptops, at least in my area. And the 3 or so models that exist are wildly more expensive…
AMD has learned that laptop gamers don’t give a shit about anything that’s not Nvidia. Their dGPU laptop solutions were never desirable for the general market, so they’ve instead started focussing a lot more on stronger APUs.
I just built a new system and named it gloria_allred because it’s the first time in forever that I’ve used AMD cpu and gpu, so it’s all red.
It’s (almost) always Nvidia.