Running windows games with steam on a hybrid graphics card

I don’t play much, but when I do, it’s Sid Meier’s Civilization on a Windows installation boxed into a VM. Earlier this year I got tricked by a Humble-Bundle offer into buying Civilization V, which came with the “trojan horse” of a steam account. Had I known the prerequisite of a Steam account before hand, I wouldn’t have bought it – but sometimes fate pushes me into the right direction, for I came to absolutely love it.

There are some bad news to start with: you pay for it, but you don’t really own the game as an independent installation package; it will run only within  Steam. More bad news: it won’t run on Steam for linux.

The good news: Steam for Windows will run fine with Wine or Play On Linux; it’s documented thoroughly, google it up.

Bad news for hybrid graphics card owners, like the Asus N56V I own: it will run only on the standard Intel graphics card which makes scrolling and zooming (Civ5 has plenty of that) tedious. 

There is some documentation out there of how to get it running with optirun or primusrun, supposedly one edits in Steam the game launch options as such:

but that always resulted for me in a “file not found”.

1. Have Steam create a desktop shortcut for the game

2. Edit the shortcut file. For me it’s at /home/george/Desktop/Sid\ Meier\’s\ Civilization\ V.desktop

3. Edit the line that starts with Exec:

Obviously you have to adjust the path (for me it’s /home/george) and the rungame id. I like running it in window mode, so I also append a -window parameter.