Screen/image freezing in games on linux

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

I am getting wierd issues in at least some games, where the image will freeze on the screen and won’t update until I press esc twice, to bring up the menu and then close it. The game is still running perfectly in the background, I can still move around and do everything in it, but the screen won’t update until I press the esc.
This can happen once in a few minutes or only a few seconds apart. I have not been able to figure out what causes this. Otherwise the games are running very well.

The games with the issue so far are Soma, Metro Redux, both openGL games I assume, and Stalker (on steam play, openGL as well?).
I’m running nvidia gtx 1060 6gb with the 415.27 driver. The issue was also present on the older 390 driver version.
The OS is Linux mint 19.1.

All similar issues I can find seem to be the whole game crashing and/or freezing, which is not what’s happening here, so I’m wondering if anyone has had similar issues or if someone knows what’s going on…
Only thing I can think of trying is turning off the “sync to vBlank” or “allow flipping” settings in the openGL settings on the nvidia panel, but I’m not fully aware what they do in the first place since it’s not very well explained there. Sync to vBlank seems to be some kind of a vsync type feature afaict.

Any help or knowledge on this is greatly appreciated at this point!

2

Tried setting “-force-vulkan” as a launch option in Steam? I experienced visual artefacts and crashes to desktop with a few Steam games that were fixed with that option enabled.

3

I haven’t, but I would think the game would have to be in vulkan for that to work?
I will look into it, where it applies.

This is also pretty annoying to test, since I was playing Metro for almost an hour last night and didn’t encounter this problem once. Maybe not that big of a deal but still pretty annoying when it happens.
Also of note is that Metro and Soma are native linux ports, and the most problematic so far.

I guess all I can do for now is keep testing and playing games and see what happens. I’ll try a native Vulkan game next.

4

If your DE is cinnamon, try disabling desktop effects.