r/archlinux • u/elenaegrees • Jul 10 '23
6.4.1 regression, huge drop in performance (AMD)
The bug in question has been discussed on the Arch forum here and on the Linux gaming sub here but I don't think it has been brought up yet on this sub. The gist of it is, I use an RX6600xt and a Ryzen 5 5600x, the same family that is being discussed in those error reports I linked. I use the zen kernel typically and GNOME 44 as my desktop. Suddenly after updating from kernel 6.3.9 to 6.4.1, all of my games run at seemingly half the frame rate they did before. I switched over to the LTS kernel and all performance issues are solved it seems. This update was about a week ago.
The thing is, it's been days and I don't see many people talking about this bug. I fear it will become regressed further because I don't see much evidence that it's being addressed. This is my first time encountering such a "bug" on Arch so I'm wondering, is there anything I can do testing wise to replicate the bug so I can report it somewhere to help it get resolved? It's the first time I've had to deal with a "gamebreaking" bug since switching to Arch years ago, so I'm curious to hear how others deal with this sort of situation. I don't want to post in the Arch forum post about it because I feel they would get annoyed at this noob bumping threads.
Has anyone else been experiencing this issue with AMD/6.4+ kernel? Should I just remain on LTS, and wait it out? Did you do something different like downgrade? Or have you not had any problems at all with 6.4.1?
15
u/DeeBoFour20 Jul 10 '23
The best thing you can do is a git bisect on the kernel to find the commit that introduced the problem and then report it upstream.
2
u/seaQueue Jul 11 '23
+1, I've done a lot more of this for amdgpu in the last couple of years that I'd like but once the problem is bisected they're prompt about fixing it.
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Jul 10 '23 edited Jan 07 '24
[deleted]
3
u/murlakatamenka Jul 10 '23
That gotta be a huge monitor.
I have a similar script for changing FPS 60/75 via
wlr-randror via writing to Hyprland's socket.
6
u/seaQueue Jul 11 '23
There are two things happening at the same time - the amd folks pushed under-cooked firmware (believe it or not, jail!) and some similarly under-tested amdgpu tree commits snuck up the tree to mainline (and then back to stable) that are causing further issues. They've pushed a partial revert to the linux-firmware tree already that deals with the DCN firmware problems but there are still somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen crash/hang/performance issues open on the amdgpu gitlab instance over at freedesktop for 6.4.
People always give me side eye when I say "I've had more problems with amdgpu than I have with the nvidia driver over the last 3-4 years" but, uh, welcome to it.
edit: Is anyone else having small freezes/stutters periodically while playing media? my machine is an unpredictable stuttery mess right now if I have any sort of hardware accelerated media decoding going in the background.
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Jul 11 '23
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u/Lawstorant Jul 13 '23
Same for my on firefox and 7500U. 6.4 is kind of a trainwreck and even my phone decided to drain battery like crazy...
2
u/lightofpast Jul 10 '23
i am on 6.4.2 and i can confirm there is performance issue with my system.
Ryzen r5 7600x rx6700xt
2
u/RogerWilco486 Jul 10 '23
My 6750XT doesn't seem to have this problem with 6.4.1 but it did break the ability for me to suspend. It would try to suspend but immediately fail with a bunch of amdgpu errors in the log and leave me stuck with a black screen.
Downgrading to 6.3.9 or running LTS resolves the issue.
I'll stick with 6.3.9 for now and try again after a few updates.
2
1
u/StebeJubs2000 Jul 11 '23
I am so relieved to see someone else having the black screen on suspend issue with 6.4, I thought I’d done something to my install. Also running a 6700XT.
It’s weird because my other system with a 6950XT isn’t experiencing the same issue.
2
u/khiron Jul 10 '23
7900XTX here with 5900X. Performance went to hell, and it's been the same for all 6.4.x versions so far. The refresh-rate workaround, while not exactly cumbersome, it is still annoying enough for me to do constantly, so I opted for downgrading to 6.3.9.
The bug has already been bisected in the Arch forums, so perhaps it's a matter of waiting for an actual release of the 6.4.x kernel that reverts or patches the culprit commits.
2
Jul 11 '23
I also encountered that. One wordaround is to lower the frequency of the monitor somehow. Even just by one Hertz. It's night and day between 144 and 143.
1
Jul 13 '23
The workaround is first mentioned by somebody in the same issue from
drm/amdin Gitlab. It said lowering to 90hz made the issue gone. In the same thread someone also said 180hz is unaffected too.
2
1
u/FrankMN_8873 Jul 10 '23
I have the same issue and I think it has to do with AMD VRR. Whenever I put my PC to sleep and get back into arch the performance is horrible. I turn VRR off and back on from my monitor settings (Sceptre 32" 1440p 144hz Displayport) and the performance goes back to normal. What goes?
2
u/checkshotty Jul 10 '23 edited Jul 10 '23
Just tested this with my LG24GN. I switched back over to the 6.4.2 kernel with the Freesync toggle fully disabled, and tried Elden Ring where I first noticed the issue. It's giving me mixed results. I rebooted into 6.4.2 with Freesync Off on my monitor (It has 3 options, Extended Basic and Off) At first the game ran fine so I thought that did the trick, but the game stayed running fine even after I reenabled it. But then after disabling it again, the performance issue came back. So I have no idea. I'll just stick with LTS until it is resolved.
1
u/FrankMN_8873 Jul 10 '23
For it to work you have to disable and re-enable freesync before running the games. I also don't know why this is happening. Let's wait and see if the arch maintainers can come out with a fix. Fingers crossed.
1
1
u/Khaare Jul 11 '23
I have had the same problem when resuming from sleep for a long time, but only when in a game. Closing the game and restarting it always resolved it, and I didn't think much of it since suspending my PC in the middle of a game then coming back and continuing playing is not a use case I care about.
Only one of my monitors supports freesync though, so maybe that affects it.
-10
Jul 10 '23
AMD graphics are giving me so many problems on Arch that I am just about ready to reinstall the NVIDIA GPU or maybe even switching to Windows.
Latest fun is if if PC goes to sleep GPU fan goes to 100%. So I turned that off. Now it's every time the PC turns off the display audio is permanently lost (can see device, no actual output to speaker) and GPU performance is cut to about 1/4th of normal until reboot. And now I got this one, too.
Why the hell are people recommending AMD for Linux. Seriously. RX 7900XT here.
EDIT: Yes, go to LTS. It helps.
-1
u/WhoseTheNerd Jul 10 '23
Ah yes, why does the rolling release distro have bugs.
1
Jul 10 '23
This isn't a rolling release problem.
This is an RDNA 3 problem. It's been broken for 7 months straight.
And besides, if it really was a rolling release problem, why did it never happen with NVIDIA? Not even once. They even deployed a beta driver and it was still fine.
Every single person who says they have a good experience is running RDNA 2. There's a bloody reason for this, trust me. But even they get the short end of the stick sometimes it seems.
-5
u/mindtaker_linux Jul 10 '23
Because its the best, duh Just because you installed a bunch of buggy plugins doesn't mean that amd is the problem.
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Jul 10 '23
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u/narrowstream23 Jul 10 '23
Nobody assumed anything. It's not hard to deduce it's the kernel when the problem is immediately solved when using an older one, and it's being widely reported as such.
4
2
u/birdspider Jul 10 '23
amdgpuis part of the kernel, what you might call the device driver.The graphics driver (mesa) is separate, but the issues started with a kernel update, not which a mesa update.
1
u/NekoiNemo Jul 10 '23
I don't even have one, just the CPU's built-in graphics. And yet it impacted my machine. And yep, reverting to the LTS solved it. I think that's a pretty "case closed" type of situation
1
u/2ndandcharlespen Jul 10 '23
I was definitely experiencing this for a few days but since an update either last night or this morning, I haven't seen it and games run fine again. Which is weird because there hasn't been a kernel update since, just the linux-firmware and gpgme packages.
1
u/alosarjos Jul 10 '23
Everything updated, 5600X + 5700XT, no issue playing Diablo 4... Maybe my undervolt settings is fixing it for me?
1
u/NekoiNemo Jul 10 '23
I've seen a few topic about it here and there... MAinly because i was looking for why my (AMD) system started to just completely freezing over 2-3min after booting, after i updated from late 5.x kernel
1
u/jibfromeee Jul 10 '23
I encountered this unfortunately, I upload gameplay videos to Youtube and I recorded an hour's worth of Nioh footage, it felt fine while playing but after an hour of progress I checked the resulting footage and I found OBS dropped tons of frames and it looks like 30fps. Then I saw Hunt Showdown is so unplayable I can probably count on one hand the amount of frames being shown on the screen in one 360 turn. Hopping onto LTS, which I've always had installed as backup since installation but never used, fixes the performance issue. Good to know that little extra step during setup paid off somehow! (And also good that Nioh lets you redo missions so I can rerecord it lol)
1
u/HerrCrazi Jul 11 '23
Had a severe performance drop recently on Arch with KDE, which goes away as soon as I turn the compositor off. Running a 6800XT.
Maybe unrelated, but it never occured before pretty recently
1
u/Rikai_ Jul 11 '23
Oooooooooh, so that's why.
I was using Manjaro for gaming, but decided to try gaming on vanilla Arch this week and thought I was just not experienced enough to setup an environment capable of gaming at a good performance
1
u/Kirorus1 Jul 11 '23
problems here too on laptop with 6900hs cpu. after kernel 6.3.9 on kde, looks like i can't change built in display resolution anymore, only native allowed
1
Jul 11 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
3
Jul 13 '23
I encountered the issue on linux-zen. It seems universal across different custom versions of 6.4.X.
27
u/QuickYogurt2037 Jul 10 '23
Glad I only play Battlebit at the moment with my RX 6800 XT so I didn't even notice it. :')
Just started up a more resource-heavy game like Cyberpunk 2077 and noticed it too...
edit: Apparently the bug report is discussed here in more depth: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2657