I purchased a system76 Thelio Mira Elite With a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. I kinda regret not going with Nvidia at this point but it is what it is. I primarily use it as a developer workstation, but want to play games on it as well so I can be rid of my windows box.
I didn’t expect it to be able to play the latest and greatest games but I did expect it to be able to play older titles reasonably well. Games launch from steam and seem to work, but I’m getting between 0 and 10 fps on the title screen of Kerbal Space Program. Other games are similarly functional but poorly performing.
Where do I start? How can I ensure my GPU is being leveraged? Is this as good as it gets?
I just noticed my reply from my phone didn’t go through x.x
This seems a lot like you’re missing some 32bit libraries. There isn’t a /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i386.json listed in the vulkan logs.
I have no idea how they’d be named in PopOS, but I’d look into vulkan first. You may have the vulkan-radeon 64bit drivers , but not the 32bit. Wine needs the 32bit libraries for the time being.
Check
(or post all of dkpg -l if it isn’t too long)
to see if you have the i386 version of the vulkan radeon drivers (for reference, in arch this is lib32-vulkan-radeon, possibly the same in PopOS)
If not install them (apt search vulkan and look for something with vulkan, radeon and i386 in the file name)
looks like it is.
ii libvulkan1:amd64 1.3.280.0-1pop1~1722439676~22.04~a41a7d6 amd64 Vulkan loader library ii libvulkan1:i386 1.3.280.0-1pop1~1722439676~22.04~a41a7d6 i386 Vulkan loader library ii mesa-vulkan-drivers:amd64 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 amd64 Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers ii mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 i386 Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers ii vulkan-tools 1.3.204.0+dfsg1-1 amd64 Miscellaneous Vulkan utilities ➜ ~The whole log is too large for lemmy, but here is a pastebin link: https://pastebin.com/sxU2QYTc
System76 is advising I go full nuclear and reinstall from recovery partition, which I don’t really think would fix anything and I’m hesitant to do.
Yeah, you have Vulkan and Mesa and the GPU drivers are in the kernel. That’s the whole stack (along with Proton).
Before reinstalling completely, run a full system upgrade, I took this from system76s support page:
You’re also likely using some flatpak applications, so:
Then reboot.
They want you to reinstall because walking you through a fresh install is just more time efficient for their support staff than trying to troubleshoot system configuration problems (imagine the possible things a random user could change x.x).
Well, that didn’t work so I proceeded with the fresh install.
It works right out of the box. No strange behavior and it’s lightning fast. I’m both relieved to have it working and a little sad that the answer was “kill it with fire” as I’ve learned nothing.
Anyway, thank you for your help. :) Time to go get everything up again
Dude, the number of times I’ve resorted to a reinstall are innumerable. You know a bit more than you did yesterday and that isn’t nothing.
If you want to try a new project that’ll need tinkering with (but won’t break your existing install) look at gamescope.
Currently it’s the only way to get HDR and variable refresh rate to work. It’s what Valve made to get those features into the Steamdeck.
You just run it with
In your steam launch options. You’ll need to look up the options (otherwise it defaults to 720p@60hz). Ex:
For 4k. There’s a switch for HDR too but I don’t remember it without looking it up. You can use gamescope to enable FSR in any game, it can apply reshade shaders (so, things like anti aliasing in games that don’t have it natively).
Other than that, any issues you have with a particular game can usually be solved by looking at protondb.com
Keep using the GE-Proton builds of proton for best results.
Have fun 🤓
Variable refresh rate is cool but 99% of my games are low res or 2d pixel art, so I haven’t been too interested in HDR. Very cool though will tinker with it :)