Improving your CyberPunk 2077 Experience on Nvidia

Since CyberPunk 2077 launched, Linux users have had quite a few issues with the game, and more often so for Nvidia users while we are waiting for driver updates and other fixes in the Proton suite.

First, you should know that there are some known audio issues that are currently unresolved no matter what at the time of writing (12th December 2020):

• No enemy gunshot sounds
• No car radio
• No background NPC dialogue

In the meantime, here’s what we could collect that could improve your life if you are on a Nvidia configuration:

If the game fails to start

Try PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1 in the Steam Launch options.

There are also cases where it’s using the Intel chipset instead of your Nvidia card. When this happens, there may be conflicting vulkan libraries on your system. Try temporarily disabling mesa/ANV with something like:

sudo mv /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/intel_icd.x86_64.json /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/intel_icd.x86_64.json.disabled

and see if it has an effect.

If you have audio cracking issues

Try adding to your launch options:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command% 

Several people have reported clear improvement on audio using such launch flags.

If you have game freezes, stability issues

As mentioned by Valve:

Running the game on NVIDIA is currently known to crash the GPU. It’s currently only stable on AMD Mesa drivers that support the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type extension.

There are however two tricks that seem to help somewhat on Nvidia:

Try deleting steamapps/compatdata/1091500 – this will force the game to reinstall some libraries and somehow improves stability. Don’t ask me why.

Also, it’s been reported that disabling Esync/Fsync also improves the situation. You can add this in your launch options:

PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command% --launcher-skip

That’s all for now. Let us know in the comments how things go!

By the way, if you are from the future, note that the above will probably be outdated by late December 2020 or later. But if you can’t wait to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Nvidia these may be your best options for now.

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