Half Life 2 crash/0fps stutter [SOLVED]

Hey guys,

So I thought I’d play some HL2 again considering the anniversary and all but it doesn’t seem to want to work for me. When I get to the title screen I’m only getting <1 FPS stutter fest or when I try proton it just flat out crashes at title. Everyone else seems to be having great success with the game on Linux but not me! Oh the irony of having every other game on Steam work great for me except the one that Valve made!

OS: Debian Trixie/Testing
Drivers: nVidia proprietary

Here’s the terminal output for what it’s worth:

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/bqs9kpnyQK/

Anyone encountered this before??

Hi,

Well, all Lutris is going to do for Steam games these days is launch Steam, and use whatever Proton you have configured for it in Steam.
I’ll be honest - I haven’t run the original HL2 in over a decade so I have no idea what the default graphics are after source updates, but I used to run it as OpenGL without issues.

It looks like it’s trying to run the game through GLX, which is what old HL2 used to expect, in other words, OpenGL. I’d check driver support and options around that (and how to switch to directX) first.

Disable ESYNC/FSYNC, check Nvidia driver options, hit up Protondb to check for any known issues, and try Proton Experimental or GloriousEggroll Proton if you haven’t already.
Any other windows source-based game run okay, like Black Mesa?

Yeah I know it’s nothing to do with Lutris but I thought this might be the best/most savvy place to ask for help regardless.

When I tried proton experimental is when I get the full crash. On the default Linux runtime or whatever the game at least makes it to title screen and just stutters there. Nobody on ProtonDB seems to be having a similar issue…

I should also point out that I can replicate the problem on completely different hardware. I tried to run the game on my work rig and get the same result. That is also Debian testing but with the repo nvidia-driver instead of latest. The only thing in common between the two machine is Debian…

Also, I did what you suggested and tried Black Mesa. Same problem! So it points to there being some issue with the source engine and Debian??? At least I have a new avenue of investigation now. Perhaps some reading of the Debian user forums is in order.

My main is Mint 22 + AMD, but I have an old bookworm based box (kernel 6.1) and Nvidia 535 drivers - not a great comparison, I realise - and both native and Proton work fine.
I don’t tend to use development editions (or drivers) for my games machine, and try to keep it middle of the road - more or less where the Steam deck is in terms of kernel and drivers.

Hi, I just tested it on my PC with Debian testing (kernel 6.11.7-amd64) and HL2 ran flawlesly with both 9.0-3 and experimental proton. I have Radeon GPU with opensource drivers though.

Just an update in case anyone else out there on the world wide web has the same issue and stumbles upon this thread. I figured it out.

So it turns out my nvidia 32bit libraries weren’t installing correctly. Once I got that straightened out, all source games worked fine.

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