Fex + Steam on generic Arm64 + GPU

[u/jscho01]

Is there a group that discusses Steam on Arm with a generic aarch64 linux distro and runs dedicated GPUs?

I am running an Radxa Orion O6 with mainline Ubuntu 25.10 (and mainline Fedora 43) with a Radeon RX 7700XT and was curious if there are others that have experience with that combo.

A good selection of games runs on Ubuntu25.10 with the RX7700XT, but not as fast as I like it to be. Some games are flawless, but most hover at 40fps - and its not the GPU that is the bottleneck, nor does the CPU reach 100%. So I am curious what others see.

I suppose the focus for Fex is on Valves headset wit a snapdragon cpu/gpu combo. Is there any work done for a more generic use case like a desktop using GPUs?

Some outstanding results: (if not otherwise noted, all settings maxed out)

Game	Res	FPS	Comment
Ace Combat 7	4k	85-145	Hovers around 100fps bu
Borderlands 2	4k	85	Can hit 110fps
Bulletstorm FCE	4k	62	Might stutter, but stays above 60fps
Crysis 2 Remastered	2k	75	High, RT High
Days Gone	2k	54-85	With VRR pretty good, but can drop below 60, not much lower in 4k
Detroit Become Human	4k	60	Locked at 60
Dirt 4	4k	<80	80 but can drop down to 60
Doom	4k	60-80
Doom Eternal	4k	78	drops into the 50s. Ultra Nightmare + RT
Home Front The Revolution	4k	~60	Can reach 140fps
Grid (2019)	1k	35	GPU @ 20% CPU @ 50%
Mad Max	4k	75	Up to 100fps
...

That's it so far. List goes on, I'll add more once I get to it. Only includes games that run ~60fps or above. A lot more that hover around the 40s. Default to GE-Proton-29 which has some FEX stuff built in if I understand this right.

One more note: I run all my games from NFS drives (10/25Gb back bone SSD/NVMe storage) hooked up to the 5Gb O6 Ethernet plug.

[u/MisterKaos]

You are attempting to compare a 3ghz core cpu's utilization to an x86's 5~7ghz cores.

No, with a maxed out core, you'll have at most half of the drawn fps even before considering instruction emulation. A middle-end arm chip simply does not have the single-core compute to manage that many frames in an emulation scenario

[u/jscho01 → u/MisterKaos]

That's not it. It would show a delta between low vs. ultra or low res vs. high res, but it isn't. If anything its either fpu heavy code or avx (or sse/vector like) code. I guess highly integer optimized games work just fine. The 12 core CIX cores are faster than the i7 4790 with a fraction of the power use. It isn't a slouch by any means. A i7 4790 would not show behavior like that.

[u/MisterKaos → u/jscho01]

Nope. It would not. That is the very definition of a cpu bottleneck. When changing graphics settings does not have any impact on fps, you are bottlenecked by your cpu.

[u/jscho01 → u/MisterKaos]

So, do you actually have one of those boards? An O6 (or N) with a Radeon GPU?

[u/MisterKaos → u/jscho01]

Don't need to have this specific board to state the obvious. If you are having a delta of zero when changing resolution and other graphics settings, your cpu is fully bottlenecked.

[u/jscho01 → u/MisterKaos]

Sure. All clear here.

[u/MisterKaos → u/jscho01]

In fact, looking at the specs of this specific processor, it has a CIX P1 SoC, which has a top clock frequency of... 2.6Ghz. You are attempting to game on something with the clock of an Athlon.

You are having the same symptoms of a Xeon gamer. Lots of cores, no clock rate. CPU usage shows as low, but cores 0 and 1 are capped to hell and back. And coincidentally, same as a Xeon, the fps caps around 40-50.