mouse cursor makes screen blurry
I’ll try to add a video or photo showing it, but discords file size limits are annoying.
Anyway; when enabling a mouse pointer in a gamescope session (even in the steam menu) with steam button or just as a normal control option the screen gets blurry and the pixels shift a bit, looks like the “window” gets squeezed ever so slightly.
FSR can fix it, but only if I put the resolution Lower than native (1280x800).
Every game is blurred when showing a pointer. Disabling the pointer fixes the issue, but well, no pointer to point with.
It does not happen on desktop mode, only in gaming mode. So I think gamescope is doing something weird and I can’t really find out what it is
31 Replies
Here’s a video showing the issue. It’s hard to get on video but really annoying. As if enabling the cursor shrinks the screen from the top
When docked everything also becomes blurred when moving a mouse cursor around. Man this sucks. I’m trying a rebase all the back to 20240706 to see if it still does it there. If so it’s something with my steam settings probably. But man is it annoying
Okay I found out what it’s doing but still not why or how to fix it. Any help is appreciated
So when having a cursor on screen. The deck seems to enable “force composite”
When toggling force composite on and off in developer settings I get the same effect of blur which is easily seen in real life on that settings page
O damnit the rollback went wrong and now soft bricked my deck with no computer access this coming week. Ffuuu
Okay rebooted while mashing B and somehow grub jumped to the second option and I got back in. Got a super weird gamescope window as gaming mode but found my way into desktop to rebase to stable. Adventures..
Everything still blurry with a cursor on screen though The grub menu isn’t working correctly either, lots of weird lines and dots but luckily almost never need it Here’s more proof that enabling the cursor enables composite mode
Everything still blurry with a cursor on screen though The grub menu isn’t working correctly either, lots of weird lines and dots but luckily almost never need it Here’s more proof that enabling the cursor enables composite mode
So I thought I’d try the fix-reset-steam command and see what it does but it has a fatal error by claiming I’m offline and then just stops. Reopening steam manually continues the download of steam, but I don’t know if there’s more to the script?
Idk if relevant; when going back to desktop mode the whole gamescope session also shifts downwards a bit.
Sorry for all these messages but I’m trying to play civilization and it’s driving me literally insane, since the cursor disappears after a few seconds, making everything sharp and then back to blurry the whole time
More info; seems to be related to cursor settings ingame as well. In slay the spire the screen does not go into composite mode, and it uses its own cursor.
On munchkin it uses its own cursor but the screen does go blurry.
On civ; also goes blurry for me.
Steam deck ui; blurry
My theory is that whenever hardware cursor is used it goes blurry. Is there a launch command I could use to force a software cursor instead?
Or maybe some way to force gaming mode to never use composite mode?
Gamescope does not utilize the kernel cursor plane so it will always composite when you use a cursor. It also composites when using FSR. If you tell Gamescope not to composite the cursor, it will be invisible. it’s a debug option in
gamescopectl
What device is this onThis is on steam deck
Also the frametimes seem to spike everytime the cursor appears and disappears. With lasting effects on the games that use a hardware cursor 😦
So weird since I could’ve sworn balatro wasn’t getting blurry when using the mouse (or more correctly composite mode) but it noticeably does right now. Happy slay the spire is still fine though
Absolutely sure something has to be off
Played this game without glasses on in bed so much I would have noticed this. Probably the compositing then doing funky stuff or I’m just incredibly lucky for having noticed it earlier?
So I guess the question actually becomes; is it normal that compositing blurs the screen by this much. And doesn’t it defeat the whole purpose of docked play lol, external mouse also blurs it up
So guessing it might be getting a fix
Guess the blurry compositing also explains why my FSR is always worse than lineair then lol
Yeaaah this is EXACTLY the way fsr changes up the screen as well. Never thought this was related. I’m really tempted to just reinstall the entire OS again and see if it gets better
I’m seeing a lot of these lines in my gamescope log. Haven’t seen these in the previous logs I saved back when the refresh limiter was broken. Could this be related?
Okay the answer is that it’s not normal.
Rebased to 20240706 successfully today and the issue doesn’t exist here
Was thinking I went nuts dudes
So now begins the painstaking process of finding out which update broke it for me lol
Got free unlocked fps to go with it I guess
It probably has something to do with non-native resolutions since the problem does exist when upscaling from lower resolutions or downscaling from higher. But shouldn’t be there on native
Right now on 20240728 without issues. Will try more updates later today, gotta go do some other stuff now
Also noted here on my OLED but there seem to be some differences
The main deck ui seems unaffected for me, but it appears to be majorly impacting performance on mouse-intensive games
In my case both Stellaris (Linux native) and StarCraft 2 (GE Proton 9-11)
And the problem disappears after rebasing to 0714
The performance impact is there for me on 20240728. Having the cursor never disappear solved that aspect.
I do still have the blurry effect on the newest release, even on the main deck ui when using the cursor through steam button plus trackpad
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test SC2 due to some weird network issues. But in Stellaris I’m quite sure the blur is gone
A bit hard to compare performance there since my save is quite late game…
I tried some different versions of bazzite to pinpoint where the issue originated, and 20240807 is the first version that shows this behaviour
20240804 still works well
07 was a pretty big update so it's hard for me to see what might have caused this, seeing as the gamescope and gamescope session packages got updated and also the mesa drivers
the blurry behaviour is also still there on the testing build
Still present on 20240815 stable
Still present on the most recent update
Update: the performance issue I had is either unrelated (purely a network issue) or somehow resolved between then and now. This issue is still present, but now less important on my end…
That’s huge! I’m going to try updating again and see if the blurry stuff is gone as well. The performance being fixed would be amazing as well
Degradation in performance is gone here as well. Still blurry when moving a cursor though :(. So back to 20240804 for me
Yes confirmed! Steam deck is fixed.
External monitor isn’t, except when you use native resolution. (FSR always looks more blurry no matter the res)
But my complete usecase has been fixed; display stays sharp AND no more mouse stutter