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Topic: [SOLVED] CANNOT get Steam games to use my NVIDIA card (Read 1117 times) previous topic - next topic
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[SOLVED] CANNOT get Steam games to use my NVIDIA card

I previously made a thread about NVIDIA failing after 450 for assorted reasons. I sorted it out, but it's a long story- I'll have to dedicate a chunk of time to do a write-up I'm satisfied with.

But, just when I thought everything was peachy, I have issues with Steam.

Now, as it turns out, I don't think Steam ever ran its games with my NVIDIA card, even before the whole 450 fiasco. I just didn't notice because my Intel card performs so much better on Artix than my previous KDE Neon, for whatever reason.
But, after playing more 3D games, now I have. I can verify it via the monitoring tools of NVIDIA settings and my ears listening to the unique coil whine of my Intel graphics card, and it's been intensely frustrating.

I have tried seemingly everything relevant to an optimus laptop. I ensured the necessary 32 bit binaries like lib32-libgl and lib32-nvidia-utils were installed. I edited the options of the games to "prime-run %command%" to force them to use NVIDIA, only for them to crash with no output in the terminal. I tried installing Steam through flatpak instead of multilib, since the flatpak version has a more consistent time with binding with 32 bit libraries, apparently. No difference.

If I start recording something with OBS using NVENC, the NVIDIA settings monitor immediately shows the frequency increasing greatly, and my fans spool up. When I have TF2 focused in a window in the corner where I can still see the NVIDIA settings, the monitor says the card is idling like nothing is going on. If I check KSysGuard, it's the same story. Prolific GPU usage from OBS, absolutely nothing from TF2.

I can even manually run Windows Steam games through Wine using my NVIDIA GPU. Dino D-Day uses NVIDIA through manual Wine. But, if I launch it with Proton through Steam, it clearly uses my Intel graphics.

Outside of Steam games, osu! uses my NVIDIA graphics just fine. It's an OpenGL program like TF2, so OpenGL is probably not the culprit for any of this.

Any ideas?

Re: CANNOT get Steam games to use my NVIDIA card

Reply #1 –
steam is not our package... I don't think it's a problem with artixlinux, but rather a problem with nvidia in linux/steam. my AMD cause no problems in steam

Re: CANNOT get Steam games to use my NVIDIA card

Reply #2 –
Quote from: alium – on
steam is not our package... I don't think it's a problem with artixlinux, but rather a problem with nvidia in linux/steam. my AMD cause no problems in steam
Oh, it's definitely not a problem with Artix, specifically. Just something weird where Steam isn't utilizing 32 bit libraries for NVIDIA or something.

Re: CANNOT get Steam games to use my NVIDIA card

Reply #3 –
Never mind, just launching steam with prime-run first makes games use the NVIDIA GPU. I read somewhere that that's not necessary, but I don't know why it took so long for me to try it...