Kernel 7.3 should help here, with VRAM management patches coming that will help with low VRAM GPUs. It's not released yet, however.

You need to find out which of the PC games settings affect the VRAM the most, then dial back those. As this depends from game to game, its hard to give general advice that works the same for all games, besides universal settings like resolution and texture settings in example. As others mentioned, use FSR (or any other method) to play in lower resolution and upscale them to the output resolution you want. That means in example the game renders in let's say 720p internally and outputs to your monitors 1080p resolution. That will reduce the load of VRAM for the game, but still look okay for the output.

Older games (depend on how old we talk about) shouldn't have such a problem, because they were designed with lower VRAM in mind anyway. Emulation games hardly need more than 4gb VRAM.

Should be enough for almost all games at 1080p. For newer games lower texture settings if needed.

I have a 1650 Super with 4GB and it runs everything I have at 1080p very nicely. I don't feel the need to upgrade.

FSR and lower settings (texture resolution and shaders in particular) are your friend. Also Gamemode to reduce background load from other processes, but Bazzite already takes care of that I assume.

Other than that there's hardly anything you can do except limit your gaming to any game with a mininum requirement of <=4gb VRAM. In some special cases there might be mods available that pull down the graphics harshly beyond what the game intended (I know such mods from e.g. NieR:Automata), but that's pretty much the limit of possibilities for the end-user.

In emulators there sometimes are settings letting you adjust the texture sizes, internal resolution and alike, those are definitely most interesting if some game lags on your machine due to VRAM.

I’m a similar situation. I have a 4gb rx 470.

I found that using fsr helps.

Without it, my computer will crash in baldurs gate 3, but if I turn it on, then it runs fine.

I'm not expert so wait for better responses but I would think it may vary by game. Maybe a dxvk.conf file to restrict the game to think you have less than 4gb, like 3.4 or something so it leaves overhead for other tasks.

Hopefully someone will come along and offer some past xp with bazzite, it may be worthwhile to mention a few games you plan to play just in case someone else plays them even if it's not in bazzite their distro settings may work the same performance wise

I don't understand the question? Just tweak the ee5tings until performance is acceptable? Optimizing a game for a GPU, display, and user config is non trivial and varies from game to game.

I'm assuming (given the text in the post and the community) that this is for gaming purposes.

Well, the simplest is going to just be "reduce the high-level settings in the game until you're getting acceptable performance". Most games will have presets ("low", "medium", "high" or similar) and while technically some of those settings probably aren't limited by VRAM, it's probably also a reasonable bet that the card is going to be performance-limited in other ways, since it'll also be older.

If the game has an in-game FPS monitor, turn that on to help you get a feel for the impact of flipping a given switch. If not, Steam's overlay has its own FPS monitor if you're using a Steam game, and mangohud can provide another.

Then if you want to try to pull more out of the card, most games have individual high-level settings. Go through and bring up individual settings on each, checking if you're getting unacceptable-to-you framerates.

If you hit some point in the game where you're seeing slowdown, drop into the settings and cut the quality options until you do get a reasonable framerate.

Some games have mods that will let one disable even more chunks of the game than the developers intended, though I probably wouldn't spend much effort on that unless I were really determined to play a particular game.

There isn't going to be a lot of general purpose, no-tradeoff "just get more performance" switches; if there were, developers would have flipped them.

You can try using gamemode.

https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode

GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.

Your Linux distro will probably have gamemode and mangohud packaged for you; they are in Debian.

Some drivers will have experimental options to try to eke out a bit more performance; typically these are not entirely stable or have bugs on at least some cards. Under Xorg, one threw these in one's Xorg.conf. I'm sure that there are still similar options in Wayland, but I couldn't tell you how to toggle them off-the-cuff. Might be all kernel command line options these days, as the kernel hands more video card interactions than it did last time I was mucking with this. My experience has been that it's generally not worth the effort.

EDIT: If I were running on a 4GB card, my first move would probably be just choosing games that don't do much with the GPU, if those are genres that you like. I mean...I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Caves of Qud. That does very little with the GPU, says that anything that does DirectX 10 or above will work fine; the RX 6400 looks like it has DirectX 12 support. Same for Oxygen Not Included, which requires DirectX 11 and recommends 2GB of VRAM; I was just playing that today. Not really making any tradeoffs on those.