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.
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=true
toPrefersNonDefaultGPU=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 :]
I am stumped. How can steam/the system exhibit different behaviour when we are executing similar commands. Maybe it is because I have an amd+amd laptop so it automatically dumps the graphically intensive application to the dGPU. Or maybe because in a desktop, the dGPU is connected directly to the display, it not switching to the dGPU automatically as the user had specified the use of the iGPU. In my laptop(which has no mux switch), the iGPU will draw the frame on the screen even if it the dGPU which determines what is to be drawn
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.