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Extreme stuttering in Steam Client and Overlay

steamopen Steam clientDistro Family: ArchWeb Component
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#13500 · opened 2026-08-10 by Auriosi · updated 2026-08-10 · 0 comments · github
AAuriosi 2026-08-10 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): Stable Client 1785799196
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): CachyOS, 7.1.6-1-cachyos, KDE Plasma 6.7.4 (Wayland)
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: No
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
  • Steam Logs: steam-logs.tar.gz
  • GPU: Nvidia RTX 4080 Super

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

All parts of the Steam Client interface experience a noticeable amount of stuttering/frame drops, and any videos are played back at a low framerate, regardless of whether hardware acceleration is enabled or not. The rest of the system is unaffected, and all other applications behave as expected (including Chromium based), even while using Steam.

In my search for a fix, I found #13203 and attempted the fixes I found there, but none were successful in resolving this issue. The overlay also seems to be impacted, but not as bad as what I saw in the example video from another Nvidia user.
This persists across linux-cachyos-lts, linux-cachyos, and a custom kernel I normally use, with the kernel parameter fixes for each one.

Using Xephyr (Xephyr -br -ac -noreset -screen 1920x1080 :5 &) and launching Steam onto that new display (DISPLAY=:5 steam) fixed the issue for the client interface, but that just bypasses Wayland.

Nothing extracted yet.