[SOLVED] Good to go after blowing away all things Nvidia, reinstalling & reinstalling Vulkan SDK.

Games run through Steam+Proton are slow beyond playability for me. They hang upon loading and drag the entire system down to a crawl until closed. This didn't used to be the case on the same hardware. Not sure what changed or exactly when the issue began but I have had this issue for quite some time.

Dragon's Dogma is an example game I'm testing with (I have it through GOG & Steam).

- Same games (from GOG) run through WINE without issue.
- Tried on both Ext4 & NTFS drives with the same results.
- Native games through Steam work fine (examples: Rise of the TR, Dreamfall Chapters).
- Removed & purged Steam, renaming directories to .old & reinstalled both via .deb & Software Center. Same result.
- Tried various versions of Proton & ProtonGE.
- Tested with Mate & XFCE desktop environments.
- Updated kernel from 5.15 to 6.5.0-14-generic with no change.

Thoughts?

Specs:
Ubuntu 22.04 (issue was present on 20.04 as well)
CPU: i7-9700
16 GB RAM
GTX 1060 Gaming X (6GB)
OS is on a 500GB SSD
Steam libraries are on a 4TB HDD (NTFS) & a 240GB SSD (Ext4).