Hello!
I installed Manjaro (KDE Plasma) yesterday and it’s been working great for the most part. Proton games on steam work fine, until they don’t. Sometimes with a game open my whole computer will lock up. I mean completely, the only thing moving on screen is my mouse pointer, and nothing else. Most of the time I can hear audio still, and can hear stuff like opening/closing menus in game, so the game is still running, and I can interact with it. The only way to get the system back is to force shut down by holding the power button or shutting it down through KDE Connect on my phone. At first the freezes seemed to happen when I closed the game or alt-tabbed from the game, but now its happened at least once during just normal gameplay, no alt-tabbing or closing windows.
It might be worth noting that the games I’ve played so far since install have been mostly proton games, mainly Satisfactory, but the freeze has happened in Counter Strike 2, which is Linux native (I think?).
I’m on a laptop with a GTX 1660 Ti. The graphics drivers are installed, the performance in games is good and the NVIDIA X Server Settings app exists. I’ve done a fair bit of googling and have come up with no solution so far. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I’m pretty sure it’s running on the NVIDIA GPU based on the framerates I’m getting, there’s no way the games would run this well on the integrated graphics. I’ll try though just to make sure. I don’t use .desktop files though, I launch the game directly through steam, so I’m guessing I need to add it in some place in steam.
Yeah I can’t seem to figure out any way to add prime-run to steam games manually, but I’m 99,99% sure that it is running on the NVIDIA GPU. I’m getting a good framerate very similar to what I got on windows, and on windows it was definitely using the NVIDIA GPU. There is just no way the integrated GPU could run the game this well. I’d guess that steam automatically forces use of the NVIDIA GPU.
I’m pretty certain that it’s physically impossible for it to be the iGPU rendering the frames, since it just cannot do it that fast. But I’ll have the CPU temp on my second monitor next time I play and I’ll see if it overheats.
Alright reporting back with new results. CPU temp sat around 90C for a long time before the freeze. I’ve observed this same behaviour on Windows too, nothing out of the ordinary for it to be at 90C (because laptop cooling sucks). It didn’t suddenly spike before freezing or anything like that. This time it was in a game of Counter Strike 2, in which I got framerates of up to 100, CS2 would not run at 100fps on an iGPU. So it’s 100% certain that it is running on the NVIDIA GPU.
I believe that the fact that I can still interact with the software and that its obviously still running points to some graphics issue. The game is still clearly open, despite the screen being frozen, I can hear the buttons being pressed, etc. This time I was also in a Discord call, and I could still hear the other person and they could hear me after the freeze, so the system is still running. It’s only the display output that abruptly freezes.
Some more info:
I went into the NVIDIA X Server Settings > PowerMizer and set “Preferred Mode” to “Prefer Maximum Performance”, in hopes that it might make a difference.
While playing Counter Strike 2 just now after the change, I encountered a similar issue to the freezing. Instead of what it’s been doing till now. Only my other monitor and taskbar (I think KDE calls it the task manager?) froze and became unresponsive. I could still alt+tab on my main monitor, and get into the game (albeit with a task bar popup on screen). Still had to reboot to fix it though. Although this time I was able to reboot by opening a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T and reboot from there instead of using KDE Connect on my phone.
Alright, I believe that I’ve fixed it. I managed to play Satisfactory for a bit over two hours without any freezing. I installed envycontrol and ran sudo envycontrol -s nvidia --force-comp, and rebooted. Since then I’ve had the envycontrol icon on my task bar/task manager and haven’t had any freezing (so far). Before I set it to nvidia it was on hybrid mode, so I’m guessing the issue stemmed from both the iGPU and GPU being used at the same time, or switching from one to the other. I don’t know if this was the only thing needed to fix the issue, or if it’s fixed now thanks to the combination of envycontrol and everything else I did earlier. Will mark this as a solution if the freezing doesn’t happen after a while.
If you were somehow using the nvidia … then the change here is probably due to the ‘force full composition pipeline’ that I assume that final envycontrol flag equates to.
