Hey everyone, I’m having some serious low FPS problems while trying to play Balatro on my Linux Mint setup, and I’m not sure what’s causing it. My setup includes an Intel Core i5-10400 CPU, an NVIDIA GTX 1660 SUPER GPU with driver version 550, and I’m running Linux Mint 22.1. The weird part is, although MangoHUD shows my FPS mostly above 60, I still feel lag during gameplay and even when navigating between windows. It’s especially bad when there’s a video playing on my second monitor. I’ve tried a few fixes like uninstalling and reinstalling Steam and the game, disabling compositing, and launching the game with specific Proton settings, but nothing seems to work. I’m beginning to think it might be an issue with my multi-monitor setup. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
4 Answers
Make sure Steam is running on your dedicated NVIDIA GPU. You can change your launch command to make sure that happens. Also, if secure boot is enabled in your BIOS, try disabling it. That can sometimes interfere with graphics drivers on Linux systems.
Are your monitors set to different refresh rates? If so, you might want to add
__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE=DP-2
to /etc/environment, where DP-2 is the port for your highest refresh rate monitor. This could help with the FPS drops you’re experiencing.
It sounds like you might be better off switching to a different distro that supports Wayland. I hear Fedora or Arch-based distros have better graphics performance for gaming compared to Mint. Have you thought about trying one of those?
Your NVIDIA driver seems a bit outdated since version 550 is pretty old. You might want to check for newer driver versions. You can do this by adding the Graphics Drivers Team PPA to get the latest drivers. Just run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update
This should give you newer options in Driver Manager. Also, don’t forget to make sure you’re running on the dedicated GPU by changing your launch command to:
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%
Thanks for the tip! I didn’t realize the drivers were that old. I’ll definitely try this.