Gaming Mode not Working

[j-fuxa]

When I switch to Gaming Mode, I encounter an issue where the cursor gets stuck blinking in the top-left corner of the screen. I'm unable to move it or interact with anything.

Tested with fresh Archlinux install with SDDM + KDE Plasma

[unlbslk]

Your hardware may not be supported. If you provide your system information, maybe I can help.

[chattigo-jfuxa]

I'm using a blade (AMD BC-250) from the ASRock AMD 4U12G a Crypto mining rack.
Basically it's a faulty PS5 (equivalent to Ryzen 5 2600 / RX 6600) that AMD uses for these boards.

They got support in Mesa 25.1.0 (https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/25.1.0.html).

Gaming is currently possible, and i don't have any issue.

I'm currently using something similar to deckify my machine (https://github.com/shahnawazshahin/steam-using-gamescope-guide), but it lacks features like switching in a easy way from/to gaming/kde modes

For easier communication, feel free to reach out on Discord: sasukek93

[aaravvy-git]

I'm experiencing the same issue but I'm actually using a steam deck. Same issue, blinking screen for a bit and then kicks you to KDE. Tty is accessible.

Wierdly, it worked for me for a while, then broke itself

[TheTimeWalker]

I've had a similar issue were trying to start Gaming Mode, it would kick me back to KDE/SDDM

Two things I've had to fix on my side which could potentially help you:

First, it seems like that when you just run the script on a fresh Arch, the installation of steam additionally installs vulkan-driver which includes AMDVLK. With this, gamescope won't boot at all and in journalctl you can find vulkan: vkAllocateDescriptorSets failed, which is tracked under ValveSoftware/gamescope#1465. I've had to install vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon specifically, and then I was able to uninstall vulkan-driver and amdvlk. After that, Gamescope worked

Secondly, make sure that you didn't just manually change SDDM settings on KDE. If you do that then /etc/sddm.conf would get empty, and instead you'd have /etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf. If that's the case then the gamescope session switcher won't work, since it by default looks into sddm.conf and replaes the session settings via a sed replacement. I've made sure to remove the conf in the .d folder and instead properly use sddm.conf. With this, switching between Desktop and Steam works properly.