3D Graphics

Intro

$ lspci | grep "3D"

This should return your graphics card.

Nvidia

For Nvidia it will be a bit of a struggle (or straight up impossible, support dropped as of December 2024 for Musl, so we go to arch :1st_place_medal: ).

ArchWiki-Nvidia

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-settings nvidia-prime mesa lib32-nvidia-utils vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader nvidia-utils

If you went through archinstall and selected the drivers already you might only need: pacman -S nvidia-settings lib32-nvidia-utils

Reboot. Then nvidia-smi to check.

Then you will need to prime-run x

Make sure to launch the NVIDIA settings app once at least.

I believe you can do more optimizations

export __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1

export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=0

export __GL_SHADER_CACHE=1

Also disable compositor in KDE settings

At this point i like to do nvidia settings and steam settings and reboot one more time.

Steam

Add to launch command prime-run %command% Also launch steam this way. Or it will not use the nvidia GPU.

Also if steam itself is crashing on repeat at startup use stream --reset

In your steam settings > Downloads:

Shader pre-caching / Allow background Or it will take years to launch games.

Minecraft

I also like to do this with minecraft so that you can use f3 menu to see FPS and GPU being used. It's also a chunk technology so a great test for bad hardware.

pacman -S prismlauncher

You will need a mojang account.

700 fps on a card from 10 years ago :D

Worse yet if you have a Intel Integrated Graphics Card too, then you'll need to do more things.

First would be to force x11.

pacman -S xorg-server nvidia-xconfig

For more xorg info see: ArchXorg

To check if you did this right you can echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

The game under wayland might feel smooth for a bit but then will start burning :fire: I bet you can't wait to throw that card out the window and go red team. :red_circle:

Sounds oldschool too but don't forget reboots.... mkinitcpio -P this also happens after large updates, so you kind of know you have to restart. Some people even recommend to generate GRUB cfg at this point as it would add parameters there.

Another fix I found to often work is to force a different compatibility layer.

Check out the Spell Brigade on Steam :)

I also like to test on this game because there is a lot of things going on (100 things on the screen with animations, also in beta.)

AMD

Mesa-dri-gallium

For necessary Mesa drivers, you will need some more installs, details soon. But this section will be maybe 1/10th of size 🤣

KDE Specifics

For gaming you can disable your compositor simply going into settings > compositor and tick off enable at start up