Steam always opens games on wrong screen now

[pwlinwin]

Hello,

I have a laptop running kubuntu. It is a gaming laptop with a built in nvidia RTX 2070. There is a larger screen connected via a mini-DP connection on the back that I use when I'm at home at my desk.

This used to work fine. I would run the game on the big external monitor, and keep the other smaller screen for podcasts/music/youtube/etc. But one of the recent updates in kubuntu discover (not sure which one; there may have been a kernel update in there) pushed the driver back to the xorg driver upon reboot. I had to manually revert in the driver manager to nvidia 545.29.06 proprietary. Now the only way I can get games to run in the external monitor is to disable the laptop screen.

I've tried loading the game and then ALT-F3 to move them onto the big screen, but this just makes everything in the game window to go blank. Same if I enable the screen after the game is loaded. Its pretty annoying. The external display is set up as the primary monitor in KDE display settings when connected.

There aren't any real logs showing any obvious problems or errors; more just a change in behaviour. Has anyone else noticed this with their recent updates? I get the feeling there is a setting I'm missing.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-pw

[pwlinwin]

Something I've noticed trying to resolve this. The games are actually starting on the left most screen. If I move the laptop display to the right side on KDE display settings, it launches on the external monitor (which is now on the left).

That's....annoying.

[pwlinwin]

Okay. I think I figured out what is happening. I have two monitors (laptop and external). I can configure them and orient them in KDE display manager just fine, and seemingly set their refresh rates.

The problem is that the nvidia-settings application shows the two monitors, but wrapped in one screen (Xscreen0). The laptop monitor cannot be edited in nvidia-settings. The external monitor can.

I think when the games are launching, they are launching into Xscreen0, aligned to the left. This means if the smaller laptop screen is on the left, then the games start on the smaller screen, but at the resolution of the XScreen0 which has a vertical resolution of the biggest screen, so the mouse is out of alignment.

I'm not sure how to fix this, or what changed. I suspect I need to add a second screen (one for each monitor) but I'm not sure how to go about this. I understand xorg.conf is how this was done in the past, but I'm reading that this way has fallen out of favour.

Edit: I also tried loading Wayland, but that plunged my framerate into the gutter. Apparently there is a known bug that prevents external monitors from working at full framerate on wayland when using nvidia drivers.