Hi!

I posted this on reddit and then saw that kde has a lemmy presence, so I am posting it here also, since I vastly prefer lemmy over reddit.:

Sorry if this isn’t the right place, but I have no idea where else to ask, I tried asking at discuss.kde.org but got no answers.

I am using Arch with KDE Plasma and an Nvidia GPU, when I play Steam games almost all of them work flawlessly but…

When I try to play older games (like Shadowrun Hong Kong or the rereleases of Sims 1 and 2, or Civ 4 or 5), the graphics are all scrambled like this:

Scrambled

The funny thing is, this is a photo of my screen, if I use Steam to take a screenshot it shows up normally in the screenshot folder…

Screenshot

As it only happens on old games I am thinking those do something different than newer games, it doesn’t matter what proton version I use and it only seems to happen under plasma.

Any help would be appreciated!

  • Natanael
    3•9 hours ago

    This is an issue with translating the graphics buffer to the screen, it’s a driver issue. There’s differences in the graphics APIs used by older and newer games, sometimes not every version is tested for a given driver / graphics card combination, so stuff like older OpenGL games might not work the same as a newer one running on Vulkan (or which Proton can translate to Vulkan)

    • @TechnoticaOP
      2•9 hours ago

      Would it be something that only nvidia can fix? Or is it a driver issue as in a corrupted install or something?

      Thanks!

      • Natanael
        3•9 hours ago

        Depends on where the exact cause is. Sometimes it’s fixable in another layer (like a compatibility patch in wayland) if all the data is still there, but it really should be fixed in the driver

        It’s usually a driver issue as in limited support for your specific graphics card, where some features are implemented differently from other models and not covered in full by the open source drivers

        • @TechnoticaOP
          1•9 hours ago

          Ah, alright, I am using a 3090, that I was foolish enough to buy during the gpu shortage, it’s probably not the best supported gpu as it is so expensive and not that common. I am using nvidia-dkms (thought it would have the best compatibility), maybe I should try nouveau just to see if that makes a difference.

          Thanks

          • @[email protected]
            1•3 hours ago

            Why the dkms version on arch? iirc the wiki recommends not using it, and from personal experience I’d take the pacman version over dkms any day. If there’s any compatibility differences I’m not aware of them, and ime the stability is way better with the pacman version (tho I’ve never used the same driver versions on both, so take that with a grain of salt). I’d bet nouveau is way more likely to solve your issue, but if you want to keep native performance too maybe try nvidia-open rather than dkms