Help with Cyberpunk 2077 on Mint

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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.

[email protected]

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-smi can 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 POWER
And 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.

[email protected]

What kind of an error do you get when the game crashes if you start steam from the terminal?

[email protected]

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"

[email protected]

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 --follow in 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

codeblock

by 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.

[email protected]

Okay will do. And yes because I had to Force Stop it through steam rather than it crashing on its own I didn't see any super helpful logs. I will try the command you sent when I am able!

[email protected]

When you run steam from the terminal, you want to use -d to get the debugging info:

steam -d

[email protected]

I know this is revisiting an old post, I've been unable to game for some time. When I try this I don't get any other information. However, I have seen a lot of other issues system wide that just make it feel unstable. Like when playing I will have system wide freezes not just the game freeze (unable to move mouse/keyboard is unresponsive/etc.), I've had issues in Firefox where pages will just freeze or be non-responsive and have to force close the program or again it's system wide freezes. So I'm pretty sure it's not Steam related and is just the whole OS. I can't really get logs because when the system freezes my only option seems to be hard shut down then reboot.

[email protected]

In Steam, add this to the launch options games where you crash in order to enable logging to a text file:

 PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

(-from: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-FAQ)

Then there will be a log file of the game in your home directory, named steam-$GAMEID.log.

When you're reading that log, the error that causes the freeze should be in the end of the log somewhere.

If you just want to log the output of the Steam -d command (if you can't find a crash in the proton log, for example) you can use tee, explained here since you should not just run random terminal commands you find online without knowing what they do: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/tee-command-linux-example/

 steam -d | tee ~/steam.log

It'll write the output of steam -d to the terminal so you can read it, and also to the steam.log in your home directory.

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Help with Cyberpunk 2077 on Mint