this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025

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Scrambled graphics (self.kde)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by Technotica to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi!

I posted this on reddit and then saw that kde has a lemmy presence, so I am posting it here also, since I vastly prefer lemmy over reddit.:

Sorry if this isn't the right place, but I have no idea where else to ask, I tried asking at discuss.kde.org but got no answers.

I am using Arch with KDE Plasma and an Nvidia GPU, when I play Steam games almost all of them work flawlessly but...

When I try to play older games (like Shadowrun Hong Kong or the rereleases of Sims 1 and 2, or Civ 4 or 5), the graphics are all scrambled like this:

Scrambled

The funny thing is, this is a photo of my screen, if I use Steam to take a screenshot it shows up normally in the screenshot folder...

Screenshot

As it only happens on old games I am thinking those do something different than newer games, it doesn't matter what proton version I use and it only seems to happen under plasma.

Any help would be appreciated!

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Plasma Wayland or Plasma X11?

Nvidia and Wayland still has issues, even though KDE is defaulting to Wayland. Personally I don't think Wayland is fit for purpose at present so I use X11. I have an Nvidia GPU (3070) and no issues with games including older games in X11.

[–] Technotica 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Sorry, Wayland not X11. The weird thing is that it only happens with old games, I guess I could switch to X11, but I am pretty happy with Wayland otherwise. If there was any fix I could try I'd want to do that before switching to X11.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

If you have plasma installed you already have x11 installed, so you should be able to switch to an x11 session on login even if just to test this without having to install anything else

signed, someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of hours trying to find a way to remove x11 dependence from my system

[–] Technotica 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

So uh, now it works. My screen went black and came back but I could only select 30hz. So I decided to reinstall everything nvidia, nvidia-dkms, nvidia-utils, lib32-nvidia-utils and opencl-nvidia.

After this magically Sims 1 and 2 work! I have tried to get old games to work since October, and I am sure I did this already before, but somehow it now works.

Thanks for everyones help!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

This is an issue with translating the graphics buffer to the screen, it's a driver issue. There's differences in the graphics APIs used by older and newer games, sometimes not every version is tested for a given driver / graphics card combination, so stuff like older OpenGL games might not work the same as a newer one running on Vulkan (or which Proton can translate to Vulkan)

[–] Technotica 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Would it be something that only nvidia can fix? Or is it a driver issue as in a corrupted install or something?

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Depends on where the exact cause is. Sometimes it's fixable in another layer (like a compatibility patch in wayland) if all the data is still there, but it really should be fixed in the driver

It's usually a driver issue as in limited support for your specific graphics card, where some features are implemented differently from other models and not covered in full by the open source drivers

[–] Technotica 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ah, alright, I am using a 3090, that I was foolish enough to buy during the gpu shortage, it's probably not the best supported gpu as it is so expensive and not that common. I am using nvidia-dkms (thought it would have the best compatibility), maybe I should try nouveau just to see if that makes a difference.

Thanks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Why the dkms version on arch? iirc the wiki recommends not using it, and from personal experience I’d take the pacman version over dkms any day. If there’s any compatibility differences I’m not aware of them, and ime the stability is way better with the pacman version (tho I’ve never used the same driver versions on both, so take that with a grain of salt). I’d bet nouveau is way more likely to solve your issue, but if you want to keep native performance too maybe try nvidia-open rather than dkms

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

What nvidia driver version do you have. What proton version are you using. Have you tried ge-proton? Have you tried the native version of civ 5 if so do you get the same issue?