Help with Cyberpunk 2077 on Mint
Help with Cyberpunk 2077 on Mint
Hey gang, I'm having trouble running this game. I have a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070 Ti Super, 64GB DDR5 RAM, on a B650 motherboard. My issue is frequent crashing/freezing, meaning I can't play longer than a few minutes at a time. I have tried re-installing the game, Steam, the entire OS, and then fully wiping the drives to remove Windows dual partition and only installing Mint. Then I was pointed to the drivers, so I tried updating using the ppa(?) driver availability as Mint only offered the nVidia 550 through Driver Manager. I tried each of the separate drivers, rebooting between each load, and still having the same issue. For reference, I was able to run through character creator and early intro of the Streetkid after many failed attempts. But then I get to the ride-along with Dexter DeShawn which does not have skippable sections and takes too long. So the length of that conversation is too long before the game either freezes or outright crashes.
Any suggestions are welcome, it's really really annoying me and pretty disheartening after hearing how everything just works on Linux (other than competitive online games, which I don't really play anyway).
Edit to add: I also tried the different Proton versions available through Steam, where I purchased the game.
My issue is frequent crashing/freezing, meaning I can’t play longer than a few minutes at a time
Could be overheating.
I use AMD hardware.
However, a few years back, I had a particular AMD card that, using its default onboard power profiles, tended to overheat with the default on-card power profiles in games which really exercised the thing; I understand that the vendor that made these cards had issues with insufficient thermal paste or the thermal paste detaching or something. That's the card vendor's fault -- the card shouldn't reach a point where it can get into trouble via overheating, but regardless, it was still a problem. Some people disassembled the thing and put more thermal paste on. I forced the thing to a more-conservative power profile, and that worked.
I haven't done this with Nvidia hardware, but it sounds like
nvidia-smican do this:https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-set-nvidia-gpu-power-limit-nvidia-smi/131467
Then to query your power limit:
sudo nvidia-smi -q -d POWERAnd to set it
sudo nvidia-smi -pl (base power limit+11)Might try restricting the power usage and see if your crashing stops.
EDIT: Might also try turning down in-game graphical settings. That'd decrease load and maybe also avoid any potential overheating issues, though it'd be a less-reliable option than the above, as you probably don't want to make your system freeze just by running some program that happens to throw a lot of load at your card. That also might avoid any issues that the drivers could have that the game is tickling. Worth a shot, at least from an experimentation standpoint, if you are looking for things to try.
EDIT2: If those do successfully address your problem and it looks like it's an overheating problem, you might also try figuring out whether you can improve the cooling situation on the hardware side, rather than sacrificing performance for stability.
An easy option to limit the GPU power on Nvidia cards is GreenWithEnvy.
Not sure what else it could be... For me it's running fine on an RTX 3080 on Mint with the 570 driver... ProtonDB also doesn't seem to have any relevant reports for the RTX 40 series...
Okay I'll give this a shot first to determine if it's overheating. The air from the case doesn't feel like it's too hot coming out, and the game seems to run smoothly with no graphical disturbances until the moment of freezing or crashing, but I'm willing to try it out. I'll be going through these suggestions one by one hopefully tonight and tomorrow and will try to reply/update as I do so!
Here's my suggestion.
First, check your RAM with Memtest86+ or similiar tool. This is the first test because failing memory can and will corrupt your whole system, and it's easy to test.
Second, if RAM is fine, check the logs. This is more effective then just guessing. Just copy-pasting possible errors to your favorite search engine usually points to the right direction. Archwiki has a nice tutorials about logs.
Third option is to test components one-by-one. Remove all unnecessary components, such as extra SSDs/HDDs, wifi cards, USB devices and PCIe cards. If it doesn't help, test your CPU and GPU by running dedicated CPU and GPU benchmark tools. If you still get hangs, try with another PSU. If your components test fine, it's likely a driver issue. See Arch wiki article on Nvidia troubleshooting for some tips about that.
Your last option is pure guessing. It's the most time and money consuming way to debug with the smallest chance of success, but still many people prefer it. Most often issues like these are GPU issues, so it's a good guess. However it's still a guess.
I hope this helps.
I did try checking the logs but nothing seems to show in terminal for Steam. Are separate logs for each game instance kept somewhere or do I need to live monitor in a terminal somehow while the game is playing?
I've seen other reports of this issue for nVidia cards; people are reporting that updating drivers helps, but it sounds like you've done that. If you're going as far as reinstalling the OS anyway, you might try out a rolling release distro; I've been enjoying Garuda quite a bit, and I've heard good things about Nobara and Endeavour.
I did try to install Bazzite using Ventoy on an external drive, but it wasn't working. Someone told me I should use a USB flash drive instead of an external hard drive and that may have been the issue, but I'll keep this in mind if it fails again!
The freezes and crashes could be caused by your nvidia card, I had the same issue before switching to amd
This whole PC is brand new (built earlier this year), so I don't want to have to replace a component so soon. Especially since it seems to work fine prior to swapping to Mint in general.
What kind of an error do you get when the game crashes if you start steam from the terminal?
Okay just tried it again to get a better test. To troubleshoot, I'm starting with nothing and will hopefully only change/monitor 1 thing at a time.
Just booting the PC, opening Steam via Terminal, and playing the game using Proton Experimental selected, it ran for 2m 9s before freezing (my save is right before talking to Padre after leaving the bar for the opening sequence, game freezes during the car ride before I have a chance to save again. I have been able to get past this before, at least enough to make a save on the other side, but this length of time may serve as a good reference for someone.)
Steam has a popup window that reads "steam_app_1091500 is not responding; You may choose to wait a short while for it to continue or force the app to quit entirely." After about 5 minutes nothing changes, but I can't even access that popup because it is frozen. I have to CTRL+ALT+Tab to Steam to then click "Stop" there. Here is what the Terminal reads from opening until game force closing:
"[2025-05-01 11:40:55] Nothing to do pid 7527 != 7526, skipping destruction (fork without exec?) Game Recording - game stopped [gameid=1091500] Removing process 7725 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7707 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7688 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7660 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7639 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7583 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7557 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7544 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7534 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7531 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7529 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7526 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7525 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7524 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7520 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7324 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7323 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7322 for gameID 1091500 Removing process 7321 for gameID 1091500 Fossilize INFO: Setting autogroup scheduling.
(process:8216): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 11:52:01.198: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed reaping pid: 8216 -- gameoverlayui"
Hm this part of the log doesn't look like the error. Those messages usually show up after the process has crashed. If there is nothing that looks like it's gamecrash related to you further above in the log, type
sudo dmesg --followin a terminal. This display the logs of all device drivers on a kernel level. While that is open, start the game and wait for it to freeze and see if any errors show up.Also, if you post log messages again please put them in a
codeblockby typing it like this:
```
codeblock
```
Should be more readable. If the log is rather long just put it into a pastebin or some other text sharing service.
I haven't been starting steam directly from the terminal but will try this when troubleshooting to read the logs!
Try downclocking the ddr5 memory. If running at 6000 test it at 5600.
This right here, AM4 motherboards are fucking annoying as shit.
Do you mean AM5?
If so I've had (am having) issues with it too... It's mostly fine, but the one thing I CANNOT figure out is sleep/hibernate... As soon as it enters sleep or hibernates, it immediately turns back on. And I can't find the related settings in my BIOS that are mentioned online. That's what I get for buying revision 1.0 gigabyte I guess...
How do I do that? Also, is there a check to see if this is the issue before doing it?
I have almost the exact setup you have, except the RAM and I'm using heroic launcher. I have no issues with CP 2077 My go to with game issues is to monitor the components in game. Install mangohud, configure the OSD to show CPU temps, gpu temps, clocks and also usage. That will help narrow down if the issue is hardware or software.
Okay I'll install that to try to get some monitoring in-game. Do you know if that's available directly through Mint's Software Manager?
For me it started crashing frequently as well. But I tried it on my windows partition with the same result (and even more frequent crashes). So I thought it must be some update of the game that introduced that and not Proton/Linux.
Then I tried several Proton versions and one of the older ones seems to be crashing less so I can actually play for some time.
Which Proton Version did you try? I think I've been through each of them available on Steam but can retry a specific one to troubleshoot.
I think I Stück with 8. It has not completely solved the issue but I can at least play for half an hour before it crashes. No idea if it's related to Proton at all or if I just got lucky.
I had some weird issues with freezing and black screen and changing from Wayland to X11 fixed it.
I do not know what Wayland nor X11 is. I'm running Linux Mint with Cinnamon(?).