cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47762187

When I first installed CachyOS, my mind was blown away by how quickly and conveniently I could start playing my Windows games with it. With its proton-cachyos-slr wine executable, it was only a matter of setting the game executable and runtime locations in Lutris and I could start playing the game immediately.

However, ever since I updated my system with sudo pacman -Syu in the beginning of May, almost every game stopped opening like it used to. Of those games, almost half of them would simply not open at all with any tweaking. The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.

I tried to search for the cause on the CachyOS forums and wiki. I managed to find some posts somewhat discussing this issue, citing issues with the new kernel or the proton-cachyos-slr package. Unfortunately following their proposed solutions like downgrading proton-cachyos-slr or tweaking runtime settings in Lutris didn’t fix the problem.

Eventually I moved on to the CachyOS documentation, mentioning an option of using an alternative wine executable wine-cachyos. It wasn’t available as a regular executable option and had to be called manually, but eventually it allowed me to play most of my games like before.

I don’t feel comfortable with this setup since the entire implementation feels like a hack instead of being an in-built feature, requires additional configuration process for every new game added and still doesn’t allow me to run some of my games that I have spent most of my playing hours on. I have been experiencing this for almost 2 months and I have been contemplating my decision to update my system.

Is there a way to go back to how my system was before without resorting to snapshots or a fresh installation? I don’t expect solutions as you would do in support forums; I am just in need of advice on where to start looking to solve my concern. If you need debug info or context, I’ll happily provide them.

  • realitaetsverlust@piefed.zipEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.

    This makes me think that something is wrong with your GPU and the system falls back to “default” graphics. If it’s nvidia, did you accidentally install the nouveau driver? While I appreciate the work that is done there, it’s really bad in comparison to the blob drivers.

    Try this command lspci -nnk | grep -E -i 'vga|3d|2d' -A3 | grep 'in use' and check the output. If it says something along the lines of “Kernel driver in use: nouveau”, you got your problem right there. Install the proprietary driver and you should be good.

    • enchantedgoldapple@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      Output:

      Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel driver in use: nvidia

      I believe there was a miscommunication from my side. The performance degradation is enough to make the gaming experience laggy and slow, but does not make the game virtually unplayable.

      I don’t think this should be the fault of drivers. If that were the case, I would have noticed a similar degradation other parts of my OS, which I have not observed in any degree.

      I reckon this is the fault of the other inbuilt wine executable proton-cachyos I was using earlier before switching to wine-cachyos.

      In either case, this situation doesn’t matter since after I switched to wine-cachyos, the games suffering from the degradation went back to being smooth and responsive as before. It could only mean that the issue is purely software-oriented.

      • kbal@fedia.io
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Oh, two choices. So I guess it probably switched to using your intel i915 graphics instead of the nvidia gpu. I dunno how to fix it, but it seems likely that’s what happened.