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System needs to be updated for steam to work. Advice? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Fedora workstation 42. Steam flatpak. Same behavior no matter which proton I use. 4090 using the rpm fusion team’s package

Behavior: I boot up. I fire off a game from steam flatpak. Game 100% worked fine yesterday. Today something updated, so I get “processing vulkan shaders” let it finish. Game starts - slow af. Game works, but it’s like the video card isn’t there, and the game is using my CPU’s integrated GPU (I literally think this is what’s happening). The settings are way too high so it’s a lag fest - if I turn them way down, everything is fine (at 320x200 LOL)

Ok so here’s the fix. I update the system. That’s it. Update, reboot, everything works perfectly. (Interestingly, vulkan shaders need to be processed again). My question is WHY? Shouldn’t I be able to not update and things still work? I’m not talking like I haven’t updated in years. Sometimes it happens within days. It’s not the end of the world - I was going to update anyways - but it’s annoying.

Any thoughts on what to check and maybe tweak? Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Due to the way Flatpak deals with nvidia drivers, you need to run flatpak update after any time the nvidia drivers update and you reboot the system. Thankfully you do not need to reboot after updating only flatpaks. Could not find a good source for this now, unfortunately.

As for the "why?" - flatpak apps do not contain the userspace parts of the nvidia driver required to use the GPU properly, they come packaged as separate runtimes. These nvidia driver runtimes need to match the specific driver version you are currently running. If they don't match, flatpak downloads the right runtimes when updating.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I have had weird issues ever since upgrading in place from Fedora 41 to 42 also, but I have an AMD card. For example digikam suddenly stopped working unless I run it as flatpak or I force it to use the igpu. Smb4k stopped auto mounting and I sometimes have to try it a couple of times before it works. Random UI stuff would glitch and then be fixed in an update. Just odd stuff like that. I should reinstall fresh, but I don't want the hassle right now. My games and other apps work fine.

My only suggestion is to try forcing it to use the main GPU with an environment variable like DRI_PRIME. I don't know what it is for Nvidia though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like you'd updated your system GPU drivers but not your flatpak ones. It's an oddity and I'm not sure what the fix is apart from knowing you always need to update flatpak when you pull in a driver update.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I agree that’s what it sounds like. Except I haven’t updated anything - or if something did update - it happened on its own.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

On most distros, Flatpak has a separate auto-update process that runs independent of system upgrades. Disabling that “feature” should solve the problems you’re seeing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Ok this is interesting. I wasn’t aware flatpaks could update on their own. I thought it was either “flatpak update” OR the package manager gui helper kicked off flatpak updates. I’ll have to dig into this on fedora. I’ve been running arch/endeavor for so long, it never occurred to me fedora may be auto updating flatpaks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah, definitely do this. Getting half a system update can cause all kinds of weird problems.

It can also be that NVIDIA cards have issue with different power states. My card will forget that it is connected to HDMI if it is idle for too long. It's entirely possible that the card just hibernated and the flatpak container removed it and failed to re-add it leading to CPU rendering, a reboot will fix this (which OP did as part of a system update).

You could fix it without a reboot, but that would require you digging into the problem a bit more. In my case, I wrote a script that re-set the display properties and that caused the DE to attempt to use the card again. I have it bound to a hotkey so if my display doesn't turn on, I can just press a button (instead of rebooting).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like your GPU isn't being engaged. What does nvidia-smi show?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I agree. I’ll check and report back tonight once I get home from work. It happens often enough, I might even be able to catch it in the act.