I’ve been using Arch on an old laptop for a few years now, but I use Pop on my gaming desktop. I’ve wanted to switch to Arch for a long while now, but haven’t had the motivation (if it ain’t broke, and all that). I’m finally ready to do it, but I’m a little concerned about my gaming experience. Are there any gotchas for gaming with an i7 and a 3070 ti that I should be aware of before I make the switch? Is it pretty seamless? Can I still use a freesync monitor with the g-sync compatibility setting? Is it easy to install the Nvidia drivers and well documented on the wiki? I’m open to information about any other sticky scenarios you guys encountered getting Arch set up for use as a daily driver and gaming computer.
Edit: is there any way to backup my internal drive mappings and mounting points, or will I need to set all of that up again?
I’ve only ever used Gnome for Arch, but one of the things that has me motivated to switch is that KDE 6 supports HDR. Does anyone have experience with it? Is it a pretty slick and simple DE?
I don’t think you’ll have any issues, none that you didn’t already anyway. If you use archinstall it installs the drivers for you. Not sure about freesync as I can’t really tell the difference, but there’s a setting and it seems to do something.
Not sure if xwayland flicker (including on some games) is a thing on gnome, but on kde you’ll need the nvidia 555 beta driver to get it mostly fixed. It’s on aur but you need the flag -Syud (on paru) since the dependencies can’t seem to be resolved automatically.
About the mount points, I can only think of backing up fstab and swapping the uuids.
Highly recommend kde, although don’t get your hopes too high with hdr. It’s still not finalized so most programs don’t support it. You can run games inside gamescope to make them see the hdr support but since gamesope doesn’t support multiple windows any game with a launcher makes it crash. And when hdr is enabled the color profile is set to the built in color profile of the monitor, which for my monitor makes all the colors extremely dull and boring in comparison to no color profile.
Thanks for all of the great information!
What’s the deal with the flicker? The screen flickers when playing a game? That’s definitely not an issue I’ve encountered with Pop and Gnome. I’ll definitely use the 555 driver. Thanks for that warning. That probably saved me a bunch of time.
Oh good idea about fstab. That’ll simplify the setup since I have like 7 hard drives.
Damn, that’s disappointing about HDR. I was pretty excited about getting it working. Hopefully they get it dialed in soon. I suppose I’ll still benefit being on Arch since I’ll be able to use the fix whenever it comes out rather than waiting for the next LTS version.
Thanks again for the great response.
In some xwayland programs on Wayland with nvidia gpu it looks like the last couple frames alternating instead of being shown in order once. Steam completely glitches out on first launch until you resize the window (still on 555).
Not sure if the hdr color profile issue is fixable since windows 10 also does the same thing, but that might not be an issue for you either way.
Does that driver fix the issue? If not I guess I’d rather just use x11.
For most things yes, not for steam (but resizing the window fixes it until next launch).
Edit: Most games don’t have it to begin with, only some do
Is there freesync on x11? I thought it was a Wayland thing Edit: nevermind
Yes, using X-server. You can toggle it on just like with the Nvidia control panel in Windows. You said nevermind, but there’s the answer in case someone else comes along and sees this later wondering the same thing.
Edit: you said most things don’t have it to begin with. Do you mean that the flicker issue is only present on a few games?
Yes
Ah that’s good to hear. Thanks for all of the information. I just finished backing everything up and making my install USB, so here it goes!
Good luck!
I’m replying here at the top of the thread again because it’s getting pretty crowded down there. I got steam installed and it’s working. I ran Baldur’s Gate 3, which worked flawlessly on my Pop install with Gnome, but in KDE Plasma on Arch the screen is going black for about 10 seconds at a time, then the game shows for about 5 seconds, and it goes black again. Is that the flicker issue you were talking about? It’s a pretty bad issue. I’ve been unable to resolve it so far. I’m pretty burned out working on it for now, so I’m going to take a break. But I wanted to see if that describes the flicker you were talking about or if I’m experiencing something different.
Edit: I disabled screen tearing in the KDE options and it stopped. I also made some changes to my config files, so I probably should have tested without disabling screen tearing first, but at least it’s fixed! Sweet! I have a working Arch Linux gaming setup now.
That’s not the flicker I was talking about but I do remember the screen intermittently going black in games for like half a second when the 550 driver first came out. Had to downgrade the driver to get rid of it. Eventually upgraded again and it didn’t happen so I thought it was fixed. Maybe those two or three bugs are related
Ah okay. I think I did see the flicker too when I was playing the game. It happens when changing views, like going to a loading screen, or opening a menu. That’s at least tolerable for a game like Baldur’s Gate. You said if I just resize the window it will stop?
Resizing the window stops steam glitching, I haven’t tried in full-screen games but maybe it would work
Okay. Thanks again for all of the great information and just listening to me while I shared my experience. Cheerio!
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