Steam - Big Picture Lag / Menu Black Screen / Remote Play

FAQ and Tutorials
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1

My Setup

  • OS: CachyOS x86_64
  • Kernel: Linux 6.17.9-2-cs
  • DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.3
  • WM: KWin (Wayland)
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
  • Steam Remote Play over Ethernet
  • Running Steam through the native App (not Lutris/gamescope or anything)
  • Proton: proton-cachyos-10.0-20251120 SLR

This was my first time using CachyOS, I use Steamlink and big picture for Steam Remote Play. I’m not sure how many settings were default or stored on my account, but I want to share my pointers to fix some issues I’ve seen anyway.

Big Picture Lag

Entering Big picture mode on my desktop or in Remote play was laggy and slow to respond.

Fix

  • From the normal Steam interface
  • In the menu bar go to: Steam/Settings/Interface
  • Activate Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views

It will prompt you to restart…once I did this big picture mode worked smoothly.

Extra note

I’ve had my PC start to sleep and go to the login menu, but my steamlink still connected fine, when this happened the big picture view was very laggy as well. I went back to my PC and logged in, and once the Computer was unlocked, it streamed smoothly again.

Steam Menu Black Screen

Once Big Picture Mode looked okay, the menu was still having issues. For me, pressing the Steam Button to exit streaming or got to settings would cause the screen to go black and nothing to Stream. It was open on the host computer, and sound and control worked, but just a black screen was visible remotely.

Fix

  • Start Big Picture Mode
  • Open the Steam Menu and go to Settings/Display
  • Activate Windowed Mode

Doing this works pretty smoothly, the Steam Menu might pop-up focused (you won’t see your game/big picture underneath) but at least it works.

In general, setting the games to run in windowed mode helped with streaming, in case you want to try that and see if it fixes any of your issues. Also, I still noticed some oddities with controllers, but I haven’t dug deeper into those issues yet, they haven’t been big enough problems.

Not sure these fixes will work for anyone else, but I wanted to share my experience so people don’t go down deeper rabbit holes of trying to switch to x11 or run Steam with all sorts of different options (which is where I started and was worse/didn’t succeed.)

2

did you try running steam big picture without a desktop environment with gamescope?

3

I didn’t try that before…but I just tried running gamescope to see if it worked gamescope steam (plus some other variants) none seemed to work and control was functioning but not any graphics streaming. This is through the DE, not standalone. I don’t need this to work so I am not pursuing further.

I use this as my everyday / sometimes family computer so it needs a DE to be useful for some work and family tasks. I also game on this PC locally, so starting up Steam independently when I wanted to stream to my living room just seemed annoying.

This has been the best Steam Linux streaming performance I’ve ever had though, and now that it works well in a DE (and w/ Wayland…which wasn’t the case previously and is now mandatory basically) I just wiped Windows to give CachyOS full reign of the PC instead of sideload status.

4

I have all the same issues as pmcgaugh. Getting this working properly via SteamLink is a nightmare. Best situation so far is the guide button brings up the side panel on its own, surrounding by black on the sides, and overall the animations of the UI are very choppy via steamlink/remote play, but they are now cured on the host machine at least, following his tips.

Just tried that, and it regressed to being a totally black screen via remote play, but controls still respond on host machine and I can hear the audio.

I really need steam link to work properly as it supports the new steam controller, whereas Moonlight does not.

5

I was having issues with black screen too and a combination of the following steps fixed it for me.

  1. Enable steam bid picture windowed mode.
  2. Disable variable refresh rate/adaptive sync on CachyOS desktop.
  3. Disable HDR in CachyOS.
  4. Set desktop refresh rate to fixed 60hz.
  5. Start steam with -pipewire argument

I still have bugs. After I close a game on remote play, the screen is black. To fix this I have to kill remote play client. Close steam on CachyOS. This does not completely kill steam, do so from the terminal by looking for steam process on terminal using ps -e | grep steam and sudo pkill steam/steamwebhelper . Restart steam with pipe wire , restart steam remote play client.