It's been three years today since Valve released the Steam Deck. Not only has Valve shown how incredible Linux actually can be as a gaming platform, but they really kicked the industry into gear on PC gaming handhelds.
Funnily enough I had precisely one issue out of a GTX-1080 running Linux Mint, and it had little to do with Linux.
I went from attaching two 1080p monitors by HDMI to one that attached by DisplayPort. The computer ran fine…until I rebooted it. The machine failed to POST. Turns out I could boot the machine with an HDMI monitor attached, attach the DP monitor, and it would run fine, but it would fail to POST with that monitor plugged in.
Turns out it was an issue with the card’s firmware that would cause the card to fail to initialize with a monitor running a recent version of DP attached, the BIOS would fail to find a video adapter and thus fail to POST. It wasn’t a driver issue, it was a firmware issue. And of course Nvidia provides no means of updating graphics card firmware in Linux, so the easiest solution was to rip the card out of the machine, carry it to a Windows computer, download and run the updater, and re-transplant the card.
I still game on that system; it’s my home theater PC now.
Funnily enough I had precisely one issue out of a GTX-1080 running Linux Mint, and it had little to do with Linux.
I went from attaching two 1080p monitors by HDMI to one that attached by DisplayPort. The computer ran fine…until I rebooted it. The machine failed to POST. Turns out I could boot the machine with an HDMI monitor attached, attach the DP monitor, and it would run fine, but it would fail to POST with that monitor plugged in.
Turns out it was an issue with the card’s firmware that would cause the card to fail to initialize with a monitor running a recent version of DP attached, the BIOS would fail to find a video adapter and thus fail to POST. It wasn’t a driver issue, it was a firmware issue. And of course Nvidia provides no means of updating graphics card firmware in Linux, so the easiest solution was to rip the card out of the machine, carry it to a Windows computer, download and run the updater, and re-transplant the card.
I still game on that system; it’s my home theater PC now.