I switched to Linux Mint about a week ago, and non-Steam games have been working through Proton. However, several Steam games—including Among Us, Bloons TD 6, Cult of the Lamb, Hades, and The Long Drive—either show a black screen, freeze the desktop until I Alt+Tab away, or run at less than 1 FPS. I tried Proton 9, launching with PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command%, and changing between recommended and newer NVIDIA drivers. My system has an RTX 3060, a Ryzen 5 7600X, and 64 GB of RAM. What should I check to fix this?
3 Answers
You generally should not need `PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1` with an RTX 3060. That option forces Wine's OpenGL renderer instead of DXVK/Vulkan, and it can make games extremely slow. Remove it from the launch options and test with the default Proton renderer. You can also try Proton Experimental or a recent Proton version after confirming that Vulkan and the NVIDIA driver are working.
For troubleshooting, check the basics from a terminal: run `nvidia-smi` to confirm the driver is loaded and `vulkaninfo --summary` to confirm Vulkan detects the RTX 3060. If either command reports an error, fix the driver or Vulkan setup before changing Proton versions. Your hardware should run these games normally, so this sounds more like a graphics-driver or rendering-backend problem than insufficient system specs.
The most important clue is that Secure Boot is enabled. If the proprietary NVIDIA driver was not properly signed or enrolled, Linux may fall back to Nouveau or fail to load the NVIDIA kernel module, which can cause terrible Proton performance. Check whether the driver is actually active with `nvidia-smi`. If it fails, reinstall the recommended proprietary driver through Driver Manager and either enroll the MOK key when prompted or disable Secure Boot in the firmware settings. Also make sure the game is using the NVIDIA GPU rather than a fallback renderer.
I checked my system information and Secure Boot is enabled. I’ll verify whether `nvidia-smi` works and look into enrolling the driver key or disabling Secure Boot.