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?
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.