I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon about a week ago, and non-Steam games have worked fairly well through Proton. However, several games launched through Steam either show a frozen version of my desktop, display a black screen, or run at less than 1 FPS. The problem occurs in games such as Among Us, Bloons TD 6, Cult of the Lamb, Hades, and The Long Drive. I tried Proton 9 and added PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command%, and I also changed the NVIDIA driver between the recommended and newest versions. My system has an RTX 3060, a Ryzen 5 7600X, and 64 GB of RAM. Secure Boot is enabled. What should I check or change?
3 Answers
Remove PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 from the launch options. That forces Proton to use WineD3D instead of DXVK, which is usually much slower and can cause awful performance on NVIDIA hardware. Try leaving the launch options empty, or use the normal Proton version after confirming that the proprietary NVIDIA driver is active.
The hardware should easily handle these games, so this probably is not a RAM, CPU, or GPU capability issue. Verify the active renderer with a tool such as nvidia-smi and check that the game is using the RTX 3060 rather than a software renderer. Also test one game with the default Proton settings before changing drivers repeatedly; otherwise it becomes difficult to tell which change helped.
The first thing to investigate is whether the proprietary NVIDIA driver is actually loaded. With Secure Boot enabled, Mint may install the driver but prevent its kernel module from loading unless it has been properly signed and enrolled. Check the driver status and consider disabling Secure Boot temporarily, then reinstalling or selecting the recommended proprietary driver through Driver Manager. If the NVIDIA module is not active, games can fall back to a very slow renderer and produce exactly these symptoms.
Secure Boot is enabled on this installation, so I’ll check whether the NVIDIA module is loading and try disabling Secure Boot if necessary.