I’ve been hoping to get Elden Ring up and running before the DLC comes out, but I haven’t had much luck so far. I am a newbie to Linux, currently running Debian 12 w/ GNOME, Ryzen 9 3900X, GTX 1080 Ti.
I have tried every proton version and plenty of suggested launch options with slightly varying levels of “success”, but the best I manage to get is Proton GE with no launch options and the game launches, flashes black, then white and then crashes, the whole time with the game’s custom cursor. Most other combinations get me a black screen before launch, no launch, or nothing (but steam says its running for a minute).
I believe my video drivers are all up to date, but I am a newbie, like I said, so I’m not confident I didn’t miss something. Has anyone else been running into this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Update: I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers and now only get a black screen or frozen terminal when I launch my PC. I’m currently in recovery mode and attempting to follow troubleshooting guides with no luck. “ERROR: The control display is undefined; please run ‘nvidia-settings --help’ for usage information.” Is one of the errors I keep getting, but I only get part of the help dialogue, the rest is cut off. nvidia-smi just froze everything. Would it be a good idea to just go back to my installation media?
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The problem here is that VKD3D-Proton runs very poorly on GTX 1000 series cards so if you do get it running don’t expect amazing performance. I was getting only 20 to 30fps on my GTX 1060 when on Windows I would have gotten a stable 60fps.
Post your GPU driver version.
Nouveau is my driver version. That’s disappointing to hear about the performance! I’m hoping to at least get something out of it haha.
Noveau is terrible for gaming. If you want any kind of reasonable gaming experience you’ll need the propietary Nvidia driver (for now).
Anything lower than RTX 16/20 series has no reclocking on nouveau, meaning it can only run at slowest speed making basically useless for gaming.
DXVK/VKD3D are the translation layers usually used to translate the DirectX graphics api to Vulkan. Nouveau doesn’t even have a Vulkan driver (only OpenGL) except for the pretty recent NVK. I don’t think Debian even ships or enables NVK, with how recent it is and Debian’s packages are usually relatively old.
At least for anything older than RTX 16/20 series you need Nvidia’s proprietary driver to get any usable performance (unless you go really old) and even for newer GPUs it will take time for NVK to become comparable to the proprietary driver.
That’s the issue. You need the proprietary driver for Elden Ring to run on GTX 1000 series.
Nouveau can be fine for older and simple games
But, not something major like Elden Ring. So switch over to the proprietary driver is my suggestion.
I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers and now only get a black screen or frozen terminal when I launch my PC.
Dynamic kernel modules require enrolling a MOK if secureboot is enabled. Try disabling secureboot, if that resolves the issue you can enroll the DKMS key as described here: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot#Making_DKMS_modules_signing_by_DKMS_signing_key_usable_with_the_secure_boot
Secure boot was already disabled, so I’m guessing it might be something else.
I had issues with several distros, here is the direct link for Bazzite with gnome for 1000+ series Nvidia cards. I run elden ring just fine on a 1060.
https://download.bazzite.gg/bazzite-gnome-nvidia-stable.iso
I also personally use KDE plasma instead of gnome so your milage may vary, but it shouldn’t.
I’ve got to +1 to Bazzite. I had tons of issues with Debian and its derivatives, but Bazzite works flawlessly out of the box. I use an AMD GPU but it has out-of-box support for Nvidia, I hear.
Sorry this isn’t an answer to your problem. I had similar issues when toying with Debian and Linux Mint on my laptop (Nvidia GPU). Ultimately I gave up and put EndeavourOS on it, which worked perfectly as well.
If you are super new to Linux I would suggest another distro besides Debian. Debian is great and I love it but it’s not set up out of the gate for games and newer people in general. Distros like Mint, ZorinOS, Bazzite, and Pop!OS are. Those distros will come with nvidia drivers or help you set up. Bazzite in particular is set up for gaming out of the box, I think it comes with steam and lutris pre installed.
You should check proton logs. Add the following to launch options: ‘PROTON_LOG=1 %command%’. Then launch the game, you should see log file appear in your home directory.
Also, what’s your graphics card?
I ran it with the log, set to Proton GE. My graphics card is an nvidia gtx 1080 ti. Unfortunately, the log wasn’t much help to look at for me.
Could you share it here?
It might be Greek to you or me but it might be clear as day to someone else here
Let me know if there is a better way to share this, it exceeds pastebin’s limit.
You may be missing some setup for the X server.
One of the last installation steps will offer to update your X configuration file. Either accept that offer, edit your X configuration file manually so that the NVIDIA X driver will be used, or run nvidia-xconfig
More info here: http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/550.90.07/README/index.html
I have been trying to work through this option, I went though the whole installation again and never ran into this option. Unfortunately nvidia-xconfig does nothing. I’m not quite sure where I went wrong with this and it seems like all of the help I could find is assuming I have done/already know something I haven’t/don’t.
Are you running it with EasyAntiCheat enabled? When I had an issue with the same behavior (white screen, custom cursor, then crash) EAC wasn’t initializing properly. If i recall correctly, I reinstalled the proton EAC runtime on Steam to fix it.
Also as another commenter said, don’t expect great performance with that GPU. While I was still using a 1080ti at Elden Ring’s launch I got around 35-45fps at 1440p, while easily hitting 60 on Windows.
I just tried uninstalling and reinstalling Proton EAC Runtime, but nothing changed, unfortunately.
Hey just saw your update.
Since you’re new to linux, I would suggest switching to a distro that handles installing the NVIDIA driver for you. Since doing it the “hard way” is a real hassle.
Your problem is potentially (as there’s much I don’t know about your setup) a issue with secure boot rejecting your driver and you need to enroll a MOK key. There are other common issues, if you enjoy the challenge feel free to stick with it. I’d suggest watching some youtube tutorials.
However, if you just want this to work and move forward I’d suggest Kubuntu LTS as it has a really handy installer for it.
