I recently installed Linux Mint 22.1 on my ASUS ROG Strix G513IE laptop, which has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile GPU. When I try playing games like CS2, Overwatch, The Finals, and Dota 2, I get really low FPS, often below 30, even on low settings. I tried using Proton without much success, and reinstalling Nvidia drivers didn’t help either. On Windows, these games ran fine on the same machine. I’ve also checked my system info and drivers, and everything seems to be installed correctly, but the performance just isn’t there. Does anyone know why this could be happening or have fixes for this?
4 Answers
Linux Mint can be a bit tricky with Nvidia GPUs, since the repo drivers sometimes aren’t the best for gaming. Some gamers recommend switching to a distro like Pop!_OS, which has Nvidia drivers pre-installed and optimized, or adding the Nvidia PPA to get the latest drivers on Mint. That could improve your performance quite a bit.
To check if your Nvidia GPU is actually being used while gaming, open a terminal and run `nvidia-smi` during gameplay. It’ll show you the GPU load and details. If you see almost no activity, then your games are definitely not using the Nvidia card, which explains the bad performance.
Thanks for the tip! When I ran `nvidia-smi` during CS2, it showed minimal usage, so looks like the game wasn’t using the Nvidia GPU at all.
If you want to keep your integrated GPU enabled for battery life, you can try using DRI_PRIME to launch your games with the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Basically, you’d run the game with `DRI_PRIME=1 ` which tells Linux to use your discrete GPU instead of the integrated one. That way you can switch between efficient and performance modes without messing with BIOS.
It sounds like your games might be running on your integrated AMD graphics instead of your Nvidia GPU. Laptops often default to integrated graphics to save power, which causes low FPS in games. The simplest fix is to disable your integrated GPU in your BIOS or UEFI settings, forcing the system to use your Nvidia card for gaming.
I wish I could try a different distro but I don’t have a USB handy to make a bootable installer yet, so I’ll have to stick with Mint for now.