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#1 2025-12-23 07:11:21

p_noumenon
Member
Registered: 2021-10-22
Posts: 27

major issue with Dota 2 on a hybrid GPU setup

I bought a laptop a couple of months ago with both an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia dGPU, made for hybrid setups; it came with Windows, but as I've come to prefer Arch over the years and haven't really had any issues with it I figured I'd install that.

Now, getting the hybrid setup to work as I wanted took some effort to begin with, had to try a lot of things, but it was working fairly well, except for a few issues, including the one this thread is about, which I'll explain now.

Since I got things up and running a couple of months ago and all the way until yesterday, running Dota 2 was relatively unproblematic. I ran Steam via prime-run, and Dota 2 via Steam. This allowed me to play just fine for the most part, but there was a very annoying bug that I never got any clear answers to everywhere, and which I couldn't fix for the life of me. The bug was as follows:

Sometimes when I tabbed out of Dota 2 and tabbed back in, I got either an entirely black screen or just a completely frozen one; but interestingly I could still hear the music and sounds, and I had the cursor, and if I clicked on things in the menu I could still hear them. And perhaps even more bizarrely, while alt-tabbing (i.e. while still holding down tab) the menu would animate just fine as if the game was running without any issue, but once I tabbed into it it froze or went black again. Separately from this, but very possibly related, sometimes when alt-tabbing the sound would cut out completely, and I would have to restart the game to get it back.

That was of course very annoying, but at least I could play without too much issues. I tried to not alt-tab too much out of fear for the bug(s), but usually it worked alright.

But now, after I just did a system update, which I noted and read about in the Arch News involved some Nvidia stuff, the issue was way worse: whenever I started the game the screen was just entirely black from the very beginning, but still as with the bug as described above I could still see the cursor and hear the sounds, and while tabbing I could see the game. I also tried doing alt + f2 and running 'r', which gave me a frozen snapshot of the underlying game state instead of a black screen (and when I tabbed out and back in that frozen state updated itself, i.e. if I clicked on some menu and heard it switch, then by tabbing in and out I'd now get a frozen image of that new menu instead).

Then I started frantically looking into what could be the issue, and after trying a bunch of things I came across I found only a single thing that worked somewhat, which was the "Effects" settings in Cinnamon, disabling them all made it so that when I start the game it works as intended and I can see everything, but if I alt-tab it immediately freezes into the same bug again. Extremely frustrating.

That's pretty much where I'm at right now, and I just can't figure this out at all, so I hope someone with more experience could help me. Will happily run any commands for information that anyone wants and needs to help me. Ideally I want it to work perfectly so that I can tab in and out of the game as much as I like without any frozen or black screen (and also without the sound disappearing too if possible, but that's not as important).

Hope someone can help.

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