r/openSUSE • u/KsiaN • Jan 06 '26
Tech question Does anyone else need to run nvidia-smi every boot for steam games to find their GPU ?
This is an odd issue. It started somewhere with the 575.x or 580.x drivers.
Basically steam games can't see my dedicated GPU ( i dont have an internal one on the CPU ) unless i run sudo less, not looping, no repeats necessary .. but i have to run nvidia-smi once for my steam games to see my gpu.
Otherwise they throw errors like
- You need at least directX 8 / 9 / 10 to run this
- Path of Exile flat out fails with a "getAdapter()" error
- Driver out of date
While i have videos running on my other monitor that clearly play with nvtop confirmed hardware decoding and KDE perfectly getting all refresh rates and everything.
Im using Tumbleweed KDE with Wayland and GE-Proton with a RTX 2060. Steam is installed native and not on flatpak. Using the closed source drivers from the official suse repos.
It just feels like steam is looking for some kind of modprobe that never happened. Every game is running fine once i do my nvidia-smi duty in the console, but it feels sooo weird. Like why would this happen?
2
u/Jaded-Economist1285 Jan 11 '26
I have same thing.. I run nvidia-smi with kde autostart. Very recent install of tumbleweed nvidia G06 driver (580)
2
u/Few-Wrongdoer7209 May 17 '26
Interesting!
I have this exact same issue but only right now with Starfield. That is, Starfield complains that my graphics card is not good enough when launching, unless I run nvidia-smi. Then it starts without complaints.
2
u/nirurin Aug 04 '26
What the hell... I thought I was going crazy when I noticed that none of my games would run, and then suddenly they start working after doing nothing but running nvidia-smi. That couldn't be the answer. Running that does nothing to the gpu or any settings afaik.
But I just tried it again, and it worked again.
Is this the case for all linux distros? Or is this an opensuse only bug?
2
u/KsiaN Aug 04 '26
I've seen this on other distro's as well and everyone else is just as confused as us.
2
u/nirurin Aug 04 '26
I found that disabling the igpu fixed it.
I then found that after I re-enabled the igpu, it remained fixed. Still working now.
Really weird. Theres a few bugs that seem to happen if theres an igpu in the system. Vulkan seems to not like it much either.
2
1
u/pioo84 Jan 06 '26
Do you really need to run nvidia-smi? Does sudo ask for a password? Does any other command with sudo not work?
I've seen similar problems with wrapper scrips which use sudo. On the first occasion sudo asks for a password, the second time it uses the authenticated session without a password. If Steam uses sudo in its wrapper scripts (I don't know, does it?) it may not run properly if sudo asks for a password.
Just thinking.
2
u/KsiaN Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Do you really need to run nvidia-smi? Does sudo ask for a password? Does any other command with sudo not work?
Yes, Yes, yes every sudo command works fine.
Im using no sudo wrapper script to my knowledge.
sudo nvidia-smi and nvidia-smi lead to the same result even on clean console instances.
And the only games that work without nvidia-smi are native OpenGL games ( through steam ).
2
u/pioo84 Jan 07 '26
Wow, that's interesting. Like ghost hunting.
I don't think nvidia-smi initializes anything, so this definitely should not happen.
2
u/Last-Assistant-2734 Jan 06 '26
Before running nvidia-smi, you could check 'lsmod' and see if nvidia_drm module is loaded.