WARNING: Fullscreen on Linux may break your hardware

[sPOiDar]

I recently tried to play this game for the first time, launched it, set it to fullscreen (as it started in a tiny, hard to read window), and it immediately garbled and strobed my screen on clicking apply.

I had to hard-shutdown the laptop, and upon cold boot the left side of my screen was permanently flickering, even before login to the desktop. I was also unable to load my desktop as I suspect the game caused some very broken and unsupported resolution to be stuck in there.

At this stage it looked like the game may have permanently damaged my (almost new, very expensive) hardware, which obviously left me furiously angry. In the end I was able to restore the hardware to working order by switching the mux output to the integrated Intel graphics, powering down, and then re-enabling the dedicated GPU.

I don't know what someone with a single GPU would do - they may find their GPU/display permanently unusable.

OS: Linux
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3070 Laptop (proprietary driver)
Display: 2560x1440 @ 165Hz

[Sora]

Both my girlfriend and I use fullscreen, fullscreen borderless, and windowed with no issues.
Both running Archlinux. She has a GTX 1660 and I have a RX5600XT. Neither of us have experienced this issue, it sounds more like it'd be caused by the bumblebee daemon.

Also depending on distro you can press CTRL + ALT + F# to swap to TTY and try to resolve issues there, such as xrandr if its actually a display resolution issue.

OS "Linux" doesn't tell us what distro you're using and makes diagnosing harder.
Also like to mention chances of a game causing hardware damage are slim to none unless the hardware is already faulty, or overclocked.

Have you checked dmesg, or xorg possibly wayland logs? It'd help you figure out what the issue really was.

[Death]

Originally posted by Katie:

Also like to mention chances of a game causing hardware damage are slim to none unless the hardware is already faulty, or overclocked.

This. Software can't do what you are claiming and if it did, then the issue was close to happening regardless. Really unlikely that the game caused the issue.

[sPOiDar]

Originally posted by Katie:

it sounds more like it'd be caused by the bumblebee daemon.

I'm not running Bumblebee, my laptop has a mux switch that I have set to connect the display directly to the Nvidia GPU.

Originally posted by Katie:

Also depending on distro you can press CTRL + ALT + F# to swap to TTY and try to resolve issues there, such as xrandr if its actually a display resolution issue.

Switching to the VT resulted in the left side of the display being wonky and flickering.

Originally posted by Katie:

OS "Linux" doesn't tell us what distro you're using and makes diagnosing harder.

Arch Linux.

Originally posted by Katie:

Also like to mention chances of a game causing hardware damage are slim to none unless the hardware is already faulty, or overclocked.

Nothing overclocked, hardware totally fine until enabling Fullscreen in this game. Forcably setting an unsupported display mode would be my guess for what caused the issue.

Originally posted by Katie:

Have you checked dmesg, or xorg possibly wayland logs? It'd help you figure out what the issue really was.

Nothing useful in the journal, and unfortunately the Xorg logs have rolled out while I was trying to recover the system, since only the last 2 are kept.

Originally posted by Death:

Software can't do what you are claiming and if it did, then the issue was close to happening regardless. Really unlikely that the game caused the issue.

It absolutely can, and did. My guess is that it forced a modeline that was out of range for the display.


I appreciate you both chiming in, but I am certain of what I experienced, and it was most definitely caused by enabling fullscreen in this game - I've thoroughly put this machine through it's paces and never had a game produce this sort of issue before.

I've been running Linux on the desktop for a couple of decades, develop software and administer many Linux machines in my day job, so I'd greatly appreciate not having my experience dismissed out-of-hand. Thanks.

[FragLeg]

Originally posted by sPOiDar:

I appreciate you both chiming in, but I am certain of what I experienced, and it was most definitely caused by enabling fullscreen in this game - I've thoroughly put this machine through it's paces and never had a game produce this sort of issue before.

I've been running Linux on the desktop for a couple of decades, develop software and administer many Linux machines in my day job, so I'd greatly appreciate not having my experience dismissed out-of-hand. Thanks.

You said yourself that your hardware is working again.

[fnordianslippers]

I had previously reported a bug where the in-game mouse cursor remained active when going back to the gnome desktop, leaving me unable to interact with Gnome, even when PZ was terminated, requiring a reboot to fix. Since the new release this problem seems to have been resolved. I am having no issues here now, with a GTX 1660 graphics card, on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Nvidia 470.86 driver and a 2560x1440 60Hz display.
I know that a "works for me" post doesn't help the OP with their issue, but it doesn't seem to be a Linux specific issue or an issue affecting Nvidia GPUs in general.