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twelveten

Member

Registered: 2022-11-01

Posts: 5

Proton games unplayably slow without ForceCompositionPipeline=Off

Hello,

I am trying to understand why when I don't use

nvidia-settings -c :0 -a CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline=Off }"

any Proton games I start in Steam will be so slow I don't even make it into the main menu. I am using a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and we are talking about basic 2D here, nothing resource intensive.

Given that everything outside of Proton seems to work pretty fine it feels really odd that even basic 2D games appear to have that issue. There is no single Proton game where I can make it to the main menu without this.

I wonder if this is the symptom of a more general problem.

I am using i3, there is nothing else going so It's really confusing.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,430

Re: Proton games unplayably slow without ForceCompositionPipeline=Off

CompositionPipeline in general is a hack to enforce some form of compositing accross the entire screen and generally very inefficient when operating with graphically intensive tasks. Check whether things work again if you disable Vsync in game, as otherwise you are syncing twice.

FWIW you might also want to make sure that lib32-nvidia-utils is installed so you're not operating on a software renderer for 32bit stuff.

A generally "better" approach would be to prevent desktop tearing with a compositor that can disable itself on demand, like e.g. setting up picom or so.

To check your general setup, maybe post your xorg log and

glxinfo -B #mesa-utils
vulkaninfo --summary #mesa-demos

twelveten

Member

Registered: 2022-11-01

Posts: 5

Re: Proton games unplayably slow without ForceCompositionPipeline=Off

Okay, but even if I'd lose some frames it shouldn't be like day and night. Setting ForceCompositionPipeline=Off somehow in Proton games makes it so that I cannot even switch to another workspace, without waiting for a minute or so when it's instant otherwise.

In other words we talk about way more than let's say a 90% performance decrease for even 2D stuff. That seems a bit absurd. When starting native games this isn't the case. Isn't that really odd?

lib32-nvidia-utils is of course installed