Hey fellow Linux gamers! 👾

I’ve been facing some weird performance issues with ‘Need for Speed Heat’ on Steam, and I’m hoping the community can help me troubleshoot. Here’s the lowdown:

Issue: Experiencing severe stutters and bad frametimes on default kernels (zen, standard, LTS) when running ‘Need for Speed Heat’ at the lowest settings (720p). Strangely, switching to the linux-amd kernel resolves the problem, giving me smooth gameplay at 90FPS+ on ultra settings in 1440p.

Observations:

  • In mangoHud, noticed that vulkan_driver shows up as ‘mesa’ in linux-amd kernel, while in other kernels, it’s ‘LLPC.’
  • No issues with other games in Lutris and SteamPlay across all kernels.

Investigation Steps Taken:

  1. Compared ‘lsmod’ output.
  2. Checked config files of different kernels.
  3. Compared vulkaninfo of both kernels.

Findings:

  • AMD kernel seems to disable most things for Intel CPU and keeps settings for AMD.
  • Vulkaninfo difference mainly in GPU VkPhysicalDeviceMemoryProperties.

Specs:

CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-13500
GPU: AMD AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (navi22, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 6.6.1-zen1-1-zen)
RAM: 16GB
Game Drive: gen4 NVME
Kernel: 6.6.1-zen1-1-zen /  6.6.1-AMD
Session: KWin (Wayland)
DE: KDE 5.27.9
Display: 3440 x 1440

Question: How do I investigate further to understand why mesa is not used in the rest of the kernels? Any suggestions on how to set it to mesa?

Your expertise is much appreciated! 🚗💨

Mesa (From linux-amd)

LLPC (from linux, linux-lte, linux-zen)

  • Sage_of_7th_PathOPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thanks! setting gamemoderun mangohud DRI_PRIME=0 %command% shows mesa-* as driver in mangoHud, but the stuttering still exists which i was hopping this would have fixed.

    The frametime graph

    I suspect this is due to my CPU, I see such graph if I keep some CPU intensive workload (Like video encoding) on in background during gaming in Lutris.

    During ‘Need for speed heat’ launch from Steam I see same kind of frametime graph (More extreme) even though my CPU was free before launching this game.

    I think that amd-kernel is turning something ON or keeping it OFF for intel CPU…

    Only thing that bugs me is it works smooth in that linux-amd kernel and in any other kernel (I could have used AMD kernel but since I have intel GPU its missing kernel modules like coretemp whichout which i can’t monitor my CPU temps).

    ​

    If it did not work in any kernel, I could have said game it and left it at that.