Up until a recent research project/experiment, I never used LLMs much. I also wasn’t much of a Steam user until earlier this year when I got my hands on a few titles for that particular platform. Most of my game library leans toward the retro side of things, but there are absolutely some performance issues here and there, like lag and frequent crashing on some titles.
I’ve been using Steam on Linux Mint since I signed up, and I wanted to see if I could somehow tweak the settings to improve them. An old gaming buddy suggested I expand my previous research experiment into fresh territory by asking Claude.
So I did. This is what happened.
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Space Marine had some problems
Performance and lag in the 41st millenium
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
Some of my favorite games are 2D and feature pixel art. Balatro doesn’t have any issues at all. But when I go into 3D games, we start running into trouble. I enjoy a good game of Space Marine once in a while. Who doesn’t love battling Orks in a cheesy FPS/melee game with major early 2000s vibes? It’s a good game, but it likes to crash on my system.
And loading takes forever. I don’t even want to talk about the lag or excessive launch time. So I asked Claude what it needed to help me get started with a performance fix. It gave me a fairly lengthy checklist:
- Launch options
- Proton version
- System specs
- Graphics settings
- Issues I’m having
On my extremely casual gaming setup, I’m experiencing stuttering during mob fights and some cutscenes. It turns out my GPU sucks.
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
It’s an Iris Xe, which doesn’t handle the demands of a game like Space Marine very well. I was not surprised. I’ve read about it having issues in Linux before. Claude suggested trying a few things:
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
Well, it couldn’t hurt. I enabled the DXVK_ASYNC launch option and launched the game. First off, it launched quickly. Previously, it used to take about 3 minutes or so. I made a few of the recommended in-game adjustments and played for a lot longer than I originally planned. Claude’s recommendations worked, although it did turn out that the in-game settings didn’t really need any tweaking. The launch option fixed the problem on my system for this particular game.
Plus, I had a much smoother gameplay experience than the previous 6 hours I spent playing the game over the past few months, so the suggestion was definitely sound. Too bad I’m such a terrible player (to be fair, it’s a very hard game).
Cuphead had a hard time loading and dropping frames
Compatibility issues turned out to be a thing on my machine
Cuphead is one of my favorite games, and while it has always run well on my Nintendo Switch, my laptop just doesn’t seem to like it. As I am literally writing this paragraph, the game is struggling to load. In-game, some of the animation was choppy, and we definitely had some frame dropping in the first boss fight.
It’s not a graphically intensive game. Claude suggested it might be a compatibility issue, so I went to properties and turned on the most recent version of Proton under the compatibility settings. Then I re-launched the game. It still took a minute to load, but it was definitely not as long as before.
Switching Proton settings improved the loading and playability of the game on my system.
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
Next thing I knew, I was fighting bosses in a majestic 1930s cartoon environment with no trouble at all. I’m a little better at this game.
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Claude stopped working three games into the tests
It seemed uninterested in going further
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
The next game I wanted to test was Battletoads or Knights of the Old Republic…but Claude stopped responding to me before I could finisht the remaining tests. I like ot joke that it “got tired of working with me halfway through.” Either way, it just…stopped.
I’ve always stuck to consoles and, aside from gaming in the MS-DOS era, have very limited experience with Steam. So, I had no idea tweaking a simple launcher setting would have such a positive effect.
What DXVK is actually doing is acting as a translation layer to help the game run on Linux. DXVK-ASYNC prevents stuttering by changing the way shading works. Of course, the community has well-documented issues with this, like visual artifacts or rendering issues. And it doesn’t fix all games. I got lucky that it worked for the two I had issues with, but it’s best to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.
I would say this is a bit of a failed experiment. Although Claude made some decent suggestions to fix my immediate problems, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use an LLM to obtain performance tweaks when you can learn more about it by experimenting yourself or mine the massive amount of experience the community has on a particular game’s performance.
Maybe it thinks my taste in games is terrible. Who knows?
AI can provide some quick tweaks, but it’s not quite ready for primetime
Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek
Would I recommend using Claude instead of, say, a community of existing gamers to help you troubleshoot? It depends on the situation. The thing is that the communities already have plenty of information available and are already enthusiastic about the games. Claude is just providing model output based on its training data. It knows nothing about the games (although it’ll talk to you like it does) and can make mistakes.
Proton and DXVK aren’t universal fixes, but Claude’s output presented them like they were.
Granted, my PC is 100% not optimized for gaming. But that never stops me from pushing things to their limits. So I’ll definitely try this again, but probably after I either upgrade my GPU or switch to a different computer.
