I recently switched my entertainment laptop to Linux after having my work devices on it for a few years.
The laptop has a Gforce 1050 Max-Q in it. I’m trying to run games from Steam that officially don’t support Linux.
If I set the PRIME profile in the Nvidia control panel to “Nvidia only”, everything works as expected.
But if I set the profile to “On demand”, the whole system freezes a few seconds after I open a game.
I read some vague comment on Reddit saying it might have something to do with me using KDE.
If I run it on the Intel GPU, it works no matter what profile is set (but super slow).
The system is freshly installed using the proprietary Nvidia driver version 535.
Does anyone have an idea what could be wrong?
I’ve never had this as an issue with KDE. Do you have the command for prime render offloading on the Steam launch options? I usually launch my games through Lutris and it handles that pretty well.
Tried it with and without, same result. It starts on the GPU and the whole system freezes.
Do you use xorg or wayland?
Not an expert, but to me it sounds like the issue is that “on demand” uses the iGPU for regular desktop parts and calls for the dGPU when you switch to something requiring more horsepower
The problem with this might be that the execution of this is slow and there’s a few seconds between the iGPU switching off and the dGPU switching on
Yeah, that is what on demand is supposed to do. But when it freezes, the game already started and rendered the first few seconds on the dGPU. One time I managed to play for ~10 minutes before the freeze.
And it remains frozen. I once waited for ~1h and it didn’t recover.
Are you running Wayland or Xorg? I’ve had some troubles with Nvidia and Wayland before, though not like this. Just a guess, since I’m not using KDE
I’m running Xorg, because I’ve read a lot about the Nvidia+Wayland troubles.
i am using nvidia and wayland on kde and I am experiencing no problems except those I also had in xorg(ui elements sometimes become unresponsive after playing a game)
Are you using a laptop that can switch the GPU or are you running Nvidia only? What GPU and driver version do you have?
