The New Big Picture Mode Does not Seem to Work Well with Nvidia GPUs on Linux clients

As you may be aware, Valve has released a new Steam client version not too long ago with many changes, including the release of the new Big Picture Mode that is inspired by the Steam Deck’s interface. It’s a great way to browse your games on a large screen, it looks way better than the aging old BPM, and is a welcome addition to the desktop client. However, there’s some problem with Nvidia GPUs on Linux: it seems like a lot of us are plagued with very poor performance in this mode (while the normal client is not affected).

On my machine, it’s something like 5 FPS or so, which is really bad. It’s been noticed by several Nvidia GPU users already on a specific issue on Github:

A few more observations:

• on Linux, AMD users are not affected by this problem
• on Windows, AMD and Nvidia seem to have no problem whatsoever running this new BPM with great performance.

Nils took a quick video of how the interface performed on his older MacBook with Intel HD5000 and you can see it’s working just fine there:

The strange thing is that the previous BPM had no such problem on the very same hardware, so there’s definitely something amiss in regard to the interface with the (proprietary?) drivers for this new BPM.

Let’s not forget that most gamers on Linux use Nvidia, so this is bound to impact quite a few of us. Will report back once a fix is found, or a new Steam update fixes the issue.

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