I’m trying to play Counter-Strike 2 on my Pop!_OS setup, but I’m experiencing a major drop in performance compared to Windows, and it seems like Vulkan is forcing this issue. I really don’t want to go back to Windows, so are there any known fixes? My specs are a GeForce 2060 and an i9-9700.
5 Answers
Unfortunately, the Vulkan implementation in CS2 isn’t great. On similar hardware, FPS on Windows with Vulkan is roughly comparable to Linux. I found that switching to Wayland gave me slightly improved frame pacing, but it does come with the drawback of not being able to use the in-game browser.
I have better FPS playing CS2 on Cachyos compared to Windows. It’s definitely worth giving it a shot if you’re looking for smoother performance!
Honestly, CS2 feels pretty unoptimized. I used to play a ton of CS:GO on the same rig, and the FPS was amazing. But when I tried CS2, I was shocked to see my frames drop to under 30 at times—not cool for a competitive game. Until I get new hardware, I might just stick to CS:Source. Seems to have a better gaming experience.
Pop!_OS was considered a great gaming distro a while back, but it seems it’s lost some of that edge. For better performance, you might want to switch to something like Arch or Fedora-based distros—they tend to play nicer with recent Nvidia drivers. Options like Bazzite, Nobara, Cachy, or Endeavour could help you out a lot!
You might want to try launching the game with the -gl option. It could help with performance issues, but I’m not entirely sure how much of a difference it makes!
