Arch Linux

VOT Productions

Member

Registered: 2011-10-22

Posts: 47

[Steam] Source games freeze up X.

Hello,
I have a problem, where source games seem to crash in a random period. Sometimes they crash in 5 minutes, sometimes they crash in 20 minutes, sometimes they won't crash.

Any source game has this problem. During the crash, X completely stops working. Switching to a TTY doesn't work, any SYSRQ combinations, etc.

Things I have tried to do:

* Disable Steam In-Game Overlay,
* Run Steam without runtime,
* Try three different desktop environments,
* Use prerelease of source games,
* Downgrade Catalyst drivers,
* Dmesg, Journalctl, Xorg log, they show no errors.
* SSH works during the freeze.
* Added more swap space to see if it's a memory leak.
* Compositing off.
* Play in Windowed mode.
Steam yields no backtraces during the crash, total freeze.

Neither of these things worked. I reported this in the Valve bugtracker, but the problem doesn't seem to occur in Mint, which I have installed alongside Arch today. So I am thinking it would be more approriate to post it in here.

Hopefully, I am being just an idiot

Alpha37

Member

Registered: 2014-01-06

Posts: 2

Re: [Steam] Source games freeze up X.

I had the same (or at least a similar) problem with Catalyst beta versions on my HD 7870 Ghz. I don't remember trying SSH, but otherwise your problem is what I remember. Immediately before the crash, TF2 would start to stutter, and eventually the system would be locked up.

I fixed the problem by downgrading to the stable version of Catalyst, which was, at the time, 13.4. I don't have any problem with the current stable version, 13.12, either. What Catalyst versions have you tried/downgraded to?

You can also try asking in The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill if downgrading to the [catalyst-stable] repo doesn't help.