Poor performance of Source engine on AMDGPU or fglrx drivers - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: blueskull
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 02, 2016, 08:56:39 am
content: I am experiencing very poor performance on my Linux machine. CS:CZ runs smoothly, Unigine Valley runs at a lower FPS, but at least it gives me 30 fps, despite it gives my 70 fps on Windows.However, the 2 Source engine games I tried, HL2 and L4D2, run very sluggish. All animations are so so, but not too bad. Whenever I move my mouse or keyboard, it starts to freeze. In the meanwhile, FPS remains >=60.I know I am running on a particularly awful CPU, but on the same CPU using Windows, I get super smooth experience on both games. I can even run HL2 smoothly on iGPU (i5-4250U) even under Linux.I highly suspect it is due to bad GPU driver. Can anyone confirm that AMD driver is sluggish even with not very demanding games like HL2 or L4D2?So far I've tried fglrx in 15.10 repo, Crimson 15 from binary and AMDGPU in 16.04 kernel, and the latter one is worse, but both 3 suck.Here is the hardware list:ASRock X99E ITX acXeon E5-2603V3 (I use this CPU before E5V4 BIOS releases, I have a 2696V4 on my hand, but I do not want to risk frying it)AMD R9 nano32GB ECC 2400 RDIMM*2 (derated to 1600 due to limitation of CPU)Once again, can anyone confirm that Source engine is not compatible with AMD drivers in Linux?

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2016, 09:37:34 am
content: The general consensus (at least on Phoronix) seems to be that the R9 Nano and Fury are terribly supported by both the Catalyst and open source drivers. Apparently both use the LLVM hacks for things that the GPU can and should handle so the CPU becomes a serious bottleneck. Unfortunately I can't personally confirm this as I don't have the card to test.

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 04:32:58 am
content: You can't really blame linux at all for this one. This is down to whatever team writes the linux version of the amd drivers. Sheer laziness when compared to the fact that Mac ( a unix based platform ) has adequate drivers...Amd has long had openGL issues, no wait, spectacular flops with openGL on linux.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 09:20:49 am
content: Quote from: blueskull on April 04, 2016, 04:12:55 amIt's such a shame to lose a user who expects so little for free.Oh. Wait.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 09:43:22 am
content: AMD's Linux support is atrocious. Always was even back in the ATi days. They will be better with Vulkan supported games.

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 11:41:27 am
content: I wouldn't count on it. Now that they have mantle, and the openGL guys now have vulkan.. Wellll, you see where I'm going.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 12:07:40 pm
content: Quote from: botcrusher on April 04, 2016, 11:41:27 amVulkan IS what was Mantle. AMD donated what they had of Mantle to Khronos when they gave up on it and decided to get thoroughly behind (what was at the time) glNext.EDIT:Quote from: RGB255_0_0 on April 04, 2016, 09:43:22 amBy it's very nature Vulkan is very hard to get up and running so for a lot of uses out of games it's not really worth it and GL will stay in use. The only way Vulkan will help with them is if the plan to have GL drivers run on top of Vulkan comes to fruition.

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 01:43:08 pm
content: I didn't know they were quietly putting mantle in the corner...If that is the case, well, rip DX, long live GL

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 02:08:26 pm
content: Quote from: botcrusher on April 04, 2016, 01:43:08 pmIt wasn't exactly quiet, pretty much everything I've seen from Khronos about Vulcan makes no secret that it's derived in no small part from Mantle and obviously AMDsVulkan API pagementions that:QuoteSorry I've been following Vulkan closely and am still trying to get something together using it.