[SOLVED] Steam Games Work on Wayland, But Not X11

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying “easy solutions” to get Steam games to run.

Since the last Proton/Steam (or maybe it’s Linux/Nvidia?) update, I noticed a lot of people seeking help with getting games to actually launch. But because I haven’t played any games in a few months, I haven’t really cared until I decided to see if I was affected — and I am. :melting_face:

Easy solutions I tried:

  • Changed my kernel — tried all the officially supported ones, including their LTS versions
  • Replaced nvidia with nvidia-dkms
  • Ran both steam-native and steam-runtime
  • Tried Steam flatpak
  • Changed Proton versions for several games
  • Changed between i3, Openbox, Cinnamon X11, BSPWM, and dk

I finally gave Protontricks a shot today. Waste of time in my case — nothing worked.

Then, I decided to give Hyprland a try… and it was like, “Issue? What issue?” :person_shrugging:

Launched like nothing was wrong. I also tried Cinnamon Wayland, and it worked too.

Games tested:

  • Akane
  • Kill the Crows
  • Tiny Survivors
  • Cyberpunk 2077 >>> Had to turn down the graphics — maybe my device is just showing its age, maybe it’s just that my computer has been on for 14 hours, I don’t know.
CPU: quad core Intel Core i7-7700HQ 
Kernel: 6.6.52-1-lts x86_64 Up: 14h 52m Mem: 4.45/15.35 GiB (29.0%)

Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 630 vendor: Lenovo 
  Device-2: NVIDIA GP104GLM [Quadro P3000 Mobile] vendor: Lenovo
    driver: nvidia v: 560.35.03

Moral of the story: Wayland ain’t so bad? :eyes:

Question: Does anyone have any clue about why this would be happening? Some unannounced dropping of X11 by the closed-sourced game library? Wayland is actually better???

I’m just happy I don’t have to buy a whole new device to play some games when I feel the urge at this point. :grin:

2

Yup. Just launched Akane in Openbox. Same as before. It launched successfully, and I could start playing, but it crashed within less than a minute.

This is what I’ve been experiencing for most games for two weeks.
So, for now, if I feel like gaming, I can log into Hyprland or Cinnamon (W).

3

Have you tried launching the games in gamescope on X11 to see if they work?

sudo pacman -S gamescope

Then go to your game of choice and use this in the launch options (assuming a resolution of 1080p is being used):

gamescope -W 1920 -H 1080 -f -- %command%

I currently am not having trouble with this knock on wood but I always tend to run most games in gamescope anyways.

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4

Which versions of Proton are you using? I’ve had the best luck with Proton 8 (for older games, like Titan Quest and Grim Dawn) and Proton Experimental (for newer games, like Panzer Corps 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’m running X11 with Xfce, Nvidia GTX 4060. All run at full 144 FPS (max for my monitors). Some I’ve had to enable Vsync, others run better with it disabled. My best advice is to look through ProtonDB; I’ve used it many times to help with less-than acceptable performance.

Why it’s only working with Wayland for you is a mystery to me.

5

Didn’t try gamescope because I always thought it, as well as prime-run, bbswitch, etc., didn’t apply to my hardware. But I’m going to give it a shot in an hour or so.

Yeah, I’ve always looked at ProtonDB before deciding to buy or download games. As far as Proton versions tried on X11 are concerned, with Cyberpunk and Akane, I went through literally all that is available in the Steam client, turned off Steam overlay, and so on.

For the other games I tried on X11, I went down to version 6. With each one, I referenced ProtonDB for launch options.

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6

I just did a -Syu and installed gamescope, but there were updates to both the kernel and nvidia. Using the launch option you gave on Akane allowed me to play like normal with no crashing.

Gamescope works! Or a combination of the updates and Gamescope. Either way, yay! :partying_face:

Will test the others later and post an update.

Thanks for suggesting it. :pray:

Update:

  • Kill the Crows also works as normal with the above launch options.
  • Tiny Survivors launches but consistently gives me a blank white screen anywhere between 30 seconds to 5 minutes. I could still hear the game in the background, and I eventually died because I couldn’t see what was happening, so the game doesn’t actually crash. This is an improvement, of course.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 launches after appearing to crash. The launch options seem to skip the RedLauncher window somehow. Plays fine except that my WM mouse is still visible, so when it reaches the edge of the screen, my camera view cannot turn anymore. Using i3wm in this case. Will try again in a few minutes.
    • Tried it again. Same issue. Will try with different launch options in a few hours.
7

I’ve noticed people reporting problems, but I have been unaffected thus far myself. Using Plasma Wayland. The last person I tried to help simply had the issue go away after time and neither one of us know what the solution was.

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8

You should use the force cursor launch option.

gamescope -W 1920 -H 1080 -f --force-grab-cursor -- %command%
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9

Thanks for saving me the time in searching for what I’d need to do. :pray:

Will try it in about an hour.

10

No problem, if you wanna see the whole list of gamescope commands just type

gamescope --help

in a terminal.

11

Yeah, I had skimmed them earlier before trying your first suggestion.

This one also worked like a charm. All good now! Thanks!