I’ve been battling some serious lag in TF2 on my Linux rig. After playing for a while, the game becomes extremely sluggish—even though it clearly shows high FPS—which forces me to restart or toggle fullscreen to temporarily get things back on track. I’m running Linux kernel 6.12.10 on Wayland (with wlroots and Xwayland), paired with an Intel i7-8700K and a Radeon RX 7800 XT using the AMD open-source driver. I’ve also been using mastercomfig settings without any noticeable improvement. Has anyone else run into this kind of performance drop, or found a tweak to bypass it?
2 Answers
One workaround that’s been tossed around is to launch TF2 with a modified preload setting—basically adding LD_PRELOAD=”” %command% in your Steam launch options. This fix has worked wonders for some users, though it’s not a magic bullet for everyone, especially since your issue appears a bit random.
I’d be curious to hear whether that tweak holds up over longer sessions or if the lag eventually creeps back in.
Another thing to consider is your use of mastercomfig. Since you mentioned you already have it enabled and it’s not solving the lag, the issue might lie deeper—possibly within how Wayland handles fullscreen versus windowed modes. Switching modes seems to temporarily fix the issue, so maybe there’s a bug in the window focus management. It might be worth diving into that angle more.
Yeah, definitely give that a try and see if it smooths things out. It’d be cool to know if it makes any real difference for you.