Wayland? Afaik the overlay doesn't work via xwayland or something.
So you either need to try proton GE with wayland directly or use x11.

edit: I might be wrong on thatone though as i dont use wayland myself but i remember reading about such thing in the past

Last edited by Xpander on 27 Feb 2026 at 7:40 am UTC

The overlay works under xwayland, but it doesn't work If you enable native wayland in Proton. It also doesn't work with gamescope enabled, If you don't enable an additional tweak.

Quoting: DoctorJunglistThe overlay works under xwayland, but it doesn't work If you enable native wayland in Proton. It also doesn't work with gamescope enabled, If you don't enable an additional tweak.

ohh ok, my brain had it wrong way then. thanks for clarifying

hmmmm okay, well thank you for the info! I'm running wayland in gnome just in general on my os, but as far as steam goes, I really have no idea. Do all games run in xwayland that means? I haven't changed any settings off the default as far as that goes.

Since I posted this, the performance monitor actually DID turn itself back on for one gaming session, then after that it has failed to work ever since.

So it seems to sporadically work whenever it feels like it, and then gets tired and has to go have a nap and just quits working for a very long time.

Wanted to do a quick follow up question: what do you all use for simple fps monitoring in-game ??? I’m looking for something super dead simple and easy and that will work 100% of the time. The steam overlay just doesn’t do that lol.

im using steam overlay with no problems, mostly just the green fps number is enough for me.
but i do have mangohud also in case i need more info. its set to be hidden by default and i can bring it up with a hotkey if theres need.

Yeah, you can use mangohud If Steam monitoring doesn't work for you.

You can use Goverlay to configure mangohud to your liking, and then it's just a matter of adding mangohud %command% to the launch options of the game.

awesome thanks you guys! I'm going to setup and use mangohud. Never used that before. Got something simple (and ugly lol) working with goverlay, but I don't like the positioning of it, so going to manually edit the config file to get it to how I like it.

One question... I see here (and on liams guide) it says to use

mangohud %command%

but the goverlay says to use

MANGOHUD=1 %command%

any idea what the "=1" difference would be? Or is that just telling it to use my primary monitor or something? I only have one monitor.

mangohud %command% is general option that includes everything.

MANGOHUD=1 %command% is alternative command for shell profile (vulkan only also iirc)

edit: =1 means enable =0 disable

Last edited by Xpander on 16 Mar 2026 at 5:48 pm UTC

Just wanted to thank you @xpander and @doctorjunglist for your awesome help! I now have a shift-f12 button with a custom magohud overlay which works wonderfully all the time no matter what.

Yall are awesome :)