So I just replaced my graphics card with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT as I was having issues with Nvidia drivers. I replaced the card and then removed the Nvidia drivers with ’ sudo apt purge ~nnvidia '. I then restarted the computer.
Everything seems to be working correctly other than Steam will launch but when it tries to actually open a window, it will appear and then instantly disappears and will flash like this several times. The icon in the top bar is still there and I can use it to exit Steam, but I cannot open up any windows with it. If I start Steam from the CLI or start it with integrated graphics, it works correctly.
Hmm… Is that a recent change? That is not true from my experience and most comments online discuss explicitly setting this to take advantage of the dGPU.
Value itself also mentions using this environment variable: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/doc/steamlinuxruntime-known-issues.md#-multiple-gpu-systems
Update: So I just tried this with City Skylines. I launched Steam from the dock/panel with the “Integrated Graphics” option and started City Skylines without the
DRI_PRIMEenvironment variable. Checking the output ofintel_gpu_topit appears that the game was only used my integrated graphics as theRender/3Dusage was 100%.I then added the
DRI_PRIMEenvironment variable to the launch options and restarted City Skylines. With the setting, the FPS counter was higher and theintel_gpu_topoutput was only around 10%… which probably means it was using my discrete AMD GPU instead of just my integrated Intel one. Also, my fans kicked on, which usually only happens with the dGPU is being used.So unfortunately, it does not appear to automatically use the dGPU… at least not on my laptop, with my configuration.
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If I just start steam from the terminal, then it uses the iGPU and I still need to use the DRI_PRIME=1 environment varitable. This makes sense, because the DRI_PRIME=1 modifier is not set in the environment.
The workaround mentioned in that post (ie. changing
PrefersNonDefaultGPU=truetoPrefersNonDefaultGPU=false) is just a way to change the shortcut (.desktop) in GNOME from using the dGPU to iGPU by default (whereas right clicking on the shortcut and selecting “Launch with Integrated GPU” only temporarily overrides the setting for that single instance).It would be nice if was automatically detected on my computer… or rather it would be even better if we didn’t have to workaround it at all and Steam just worked :]
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I’m not sure either, but this is on a laptop with an Intel CPU and AMD dGPU (strange mix) and more recently a NVIDIA eGPU.
The issues only appear with the AMD dGPU.