How to fix blurry or missing Steam avatars in Quake Live

Many Quake Live players rely on highly optimized competitive configs to squeeze out maximum frame rates, but these performance boosts often come at a visual cost. If the Steam profile pictures on your scoreboard resemble a chaotic blur of pixels or are entirely replaced by default character models, the root cause is linked to your texture rendering settings. Fortunately, restoring the scoreboard requires just a few simple console tweaks.

Fixing blurry or corrupted avatars

When avatars turn into a blurry, artifact-filled mess, it means your config uses aggressive graphics tweaks that break the engine's ability to render 2D UI thumbnails through its mipmapping process.



To resolve this, open your console and enter the following commands: Crucial step: After changing these values, you must execute the vid_restart command in the console. The avatars will not render correctly until the visual engine is fully rebooted.

Restoring missing avatars

If your scoreboard displays the default in-game character faces instead of Steam profile pictures, the game is configured to ignore custom avatars entirely.



To turn the feature back on, simply apply this command: Once your scoreboard is fixed, remember to permanently save your changes. Type writeconfig autoexec (or your specific config name) into the console, or manually update these variables within your configuration files to ensure the fix persists.