u/AlliedSalad

I'm on a Lenovo IdeaPad Y700 15ISK; it has a 1TB SSD, and Nvidia GTX 960M (4GB version), 12 GB RAM. I'm running MX 25 KDE.

This was an issue I had with some games before I switched from Windows, but since I switched to MX it's been happening with many more games, and after the latest update & upgrade, now it's every game. The solutions I've found via Google either don't work or don't work consistently.

For example, No Man's Sky was previously working using this command argument:

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia

...but after the latest Nvidia driver update, this argument no longer works, and it's back to running only on the iGPU.

I've tried the command "nvidia-run-mx" as a launch argument in Steam as well, but it has not worked.

I've tried installing and using Proton-GE instead of vanilla Proton, that has helped with some other performance issues but not this one.

nvidia-smi runs successfully and lists the Nvidia GPU as it should:

$ nvidia-smi
Mon May  4 16:18:41 2026        
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.142                Driver Version: 580.142        CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M        Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   38C    P0            N/A  /  200W |       0MiB /   4096MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

...yet for some reason Steam games still aren't using it. I've spent hours Googling and troubleshooting this, I'm at my wit's end. Please help!