Fedora 43 Steam RPM and Flatpak

Ask Fedora
, ,
1

Hi, recently switched over to Fedora after hating the direction Windows is taking. I have a 4080ti so I get the pleasure of dealing with NVIDIA drivers which tbh isnt too bad as they worked just downloading straight from the software app.

However steam is giving me some issues. When I launch games from the rpm version it will not use my 4080ti and will default to the integrated graphics. I can get around this by launching steam from either the terminal or the software app. Furthmore, the overlay doesnt seem to work with this version.

I did some research and some people having the same issues swapped to the flatpak, and that does fix both problems for me, but it will not properly capture my mouse and I can move my mouse out of the screen in the middle of a firefight…

I am currently up to date on everything using gnome (used KDE/plasma and had some weird black screen issues on my secondary monitor).

2

Is it possible that you have 2+ monitors and have set up fractional scaling (like 150%) for your main monitor? There is a known issue in the window manager (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3765) about mouse cursor not getting constrained correctly, which has only very recently (a few days ago) been fixed. So hopefully that particular issue (if you are indeed hitting the same one as me) will go away with the next mutter update.

3

Unfortunately, I have every monitor at 100%, so no fractional scaling.

4

I have seen something like this, specifically for games that use Vulkan - they will not detect your NVIDIA GPU. (OpenGL games seem to work fine?)

You can easily test this with a game that has a GPU selector in the launcher. For example, you can try the Tiny Glade demo. Launch its graphics card selector after launching Steam via command line and it should list your NVIDIA GPU. But if you launch it after launching Steam from GNOME launcher, Tiny Glade will only see your iGPU.

Likewise some games like Doom, that use OpenGL by default, will work fine either way, but crash on launch if you switch the renderer to Vulkan.

5

like i said in the post if i launch steam via the software app or terminal the games detect the gpu fine. If i just use the steam shortcut they will not.

I tried changing the .desktop file to force it to use the gpu, but no dice.

6

Try using switcherooctl to select the gpu before launching steam.

7

I always turn off the integrated gpu in the bios on my desktops.
Which should avoid issue like this.
You might like to try that.

8

Right. My intent was just to:

  1. Narrow down what is actually broken: Vulkan dGPU detection is broken, but OpenGL is fine. (My hypothesis.)

  2. Hope you could help me confirm the above, so we could figure out the root cause and proper fix for this! (Test with Tiny Glade’s GPU selector menu or similar as mentioned above.)

I just thought it would be amazing if we could narrow down the issue and contribute to it getting fixed properly for everyone, as opposed to simply implementing a dirty workaround like some manual edit or disabling the iGPU, which would leave lots of other people running into the same issue over and over again. :slight_smile: