Hey all!
So I’ve been wanting to get into Linux gaming for a while thanks to inspiration from this community, but I’ve struggled to get it working, and after a final try today I’m starting to lose hope. I haven’t gotten a single game working, most of them using Steam and Proton, but I also tried League of Legends through Lutris. I don’t know what to try next, other than maybe installing a different Linux operating system and trying again. Anyone with some advice on what I can do, or where I can turn for help? I’ve searched online as best I can but didn’t find anything that seemed relevant.
Some details of what I’ve tried if anyone is curious: on Steam I tried Trine 4 and Jusant today, previously also Baldur’s Gate 3 a few months ago. The games simply don’t launch, though for BG3 and LoL at least the launcher starts. Usually no error message, but Trine did for once tell me “GPU error detected” today. I’ve tried both Proton Experimental and whatever the newest version is at the time, today Proton GE-Proton8-14. Some system details:
Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS RAM: 16GB CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 six-core GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU Driver: Nvidia 545.29.06 (proprietary)
One thing that would be good to check is to make sure the Nvidia proprietary driver is actually controlling your video card.
Run
sudo lshw -c video
in the terminal, and make sure that under “configuration” you see “driver=nvidia” and not “driver=nouveau”.
Also make sure there’s only one entry that comes up. I’m pretty sure your CPU doesn’t have an iGPU, but good to make sure.
Try setting proton to version 7 in steam. I had a similar issue and it was down to having an older gpu that wasn’t compatible with stuff the newer proton releases were doing.
Oh yeah, I also had to change the nvidia driver to the legacy version. Yes, my computer is ancient.
Ah, Proton 7 didn’t seem to help, but I haven’t tried using older drivers yet, I should probably try that next! Thanks!
Sounds like a driver Nvidia driver issue. Have you tried running a natively supported game like Counter Strike?
See if you can update/install the nvidia proprietary drivers and see if anything works.
See also if there’s a recommended diagnostics program to see if you can get more clues if the above doesn’t work.
I haven’t tried a natively supported game, I’ll go ahead and see if I can do that.
I have tried updating the Nvidia drivers. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by recommended diagnostics problem? Thank you for the tips!
In cases like this, because of the simplicity, I suggest installing PopOS! Nvidia ISO. Chances are, with that hardware, that it will just work. Good luck bud.
You may have the GPU drivers installed but are they active? Look in “Software & Updates” on the Additional Drivers tab and see which drivers are active.
Installing the drivers is not enough, you have to select them to use them too.
If the latest drivers are active then you may need to think about switching to a legacy version (you have a pretty old CPU and GPU by current standards; newest drivers are not always best). You may also want to look at using older versions of Proton than the latest for similar reasons - there may be features and changes in newer versions that are just not going to work with your set up or your set up just isn’t tested to work with.
